The Verge's David Pierce rips it apart (in one case literally):
For $99, everyone who backed Ouya's Kickstarter has unwittingly signed up to beta-test a game console. Alpha-test, even: this is a product with some good ideas and a potentially promising future, but it's a million miles away from something worth spending your money on. Even if the concept is right, the Ouya misses the mark. The controller needs work, the interface is a mess, and have I mentioned there's really nothing to do with the thing? I'm not even sure the concept is right, either: there are plenty of fun Android games, but currently few that work well with a controller and even fewer that look good on your television.
The PA Report's Ben Kuchera offers what I consider a more considered assessment, angles as a response to the Verge piece:
I have an OUYA dev kit at home, and I’ve been playing with it for the past few days. The whole thing kind of sucks right now, but that’s okay.
This soft launch is very much a beta test, and my conversations with OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman were peppered with things that were going to be added later, or that will improve, or that the team is looking at. Right now the interface is laggy, and there aren’t that many games to play. Not all the features are there, and many that do exist work in their most basic forms.
Keep the system away from your kids, because buying content is incredibly easy. The system works well, but it’s far from finished; the firmware and the feature set, not to mention game and app selection, will hopefully improve quickly once thousands of fans, developers, and enthusiasts begin to descend upon the hardware and the ODK. What the OUYA team does is important, but their job has always been merely to deliver the skeleton of the system. I want to see what developers and modders begin to do once the hardware is out in the wild.
The point about buying content being way too easy is shared by both writers, and if I were OUYA, that'd be the first thing I would fix. I urge you to read both articles. I'm eager to see Polygon weigh in too.
The OUYA plus the "Steam Box"-like PC/micro-consoles that X3i are manufacturing make for a more disruptive new category than I think Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are expecting.