This is great and all, but in one weekend you see little more than what people hate about Live. It takes time to build up a friend list and people you actually want to play with. Until you reach that point online play is little more than annoying.

If you have an Xbox, you almost certainly have a Silver account already. Otherwise you wouldn't have access to any online features (demos, XBLA, DLC and such). You can still create friends lists with Silver account, and communicate through messages and stuff. So non subscribers aren't necessarily going to have nobody to play with.

I myself don't bother purchasing Gold access while I don't have any games that I plan on playing online. My friends are the same. A promotion like this is good to at least show people how much better their life would be with Gold and hopefully get them hooked. Or to get their Xbox Live fix when they don't have cash to pay their Microsoft bill.

I run into that issue myself, my friends mostly game on PCs, so as a silver user I don't see Live as a collection of services unable to justify the expenditure on its own.