While Microsoft COO Kevin Turner did a kind of modified cheerleading act at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach played the teenage boy and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie the voice from the future.

During his presentation at the event at the Microsoft (MSFT) HQ in Redmond, Wash.–a series of presentations for Wall Street analysts and the media–Bach showed off the Xbox’s new Project Natal motion-sensing technology, which lets you play games and more without a controller.

Bach spazzed out nicely playing a game called Ricochet, with a storm of virtual red balls coming at him, although I was slightly worried the exertion might cause him to collapse on stage.

Turner was on before Bach, pretty much doing cleanup after CEO Steve Ballmer’s presentation, talking up all of Microsoft’s various businesses, while talking down its competitors’.

Said Turner, whose mantra was building market share for Microsoft: “Strong innovation, strong innovation investment, as well as strong operational excellence that we’re driving to compete and grow our market share.”

Strong, got it? (Frankly, I know companies always put their best foot forward at events like this–but after Ballmer’s own He-Man speech, BoomTown is a little worried that Scary Microsoft could be making a comeback, after a few post-antitrust years of Kinder-Gentler Microsoft.)

Bach, given his job, was a lot more entertaining and had more to show off, although he could not be as positive about the software giant’s mobile experience, given the juggernaut of the iPhone from Apple (AAPL).

“First of all, in Windows Mobile, as Steve pointed out, we had a challenging year from a share perspective,” said Bach. “Much tougher competition in the U.S. and certainly there is plenty of competition in this space.”

No kidding!

Natal is, of course, the pretty one for Bach’s division.

“It is about technology innovation and experience innovation. I think it will lead to a bigger and better business as well,” said Bach. “It is certainly an opportunity for us to build something new.”

Mundie also showed a lot of new futuristic stuff, which borrowed from the Natal technology, including a demo of a gesture-rich “office of the future” experience.

Said Mundie: “But as far as Microsoft, one of the greatest opportunities going forward is to realize there will be a successor to the desktop. It is the room. It is the fixed computing environment. The question is what can you do with computing when you have a much more robust man-machine interaction model and you don’t have to fold it in half and move it and run it on a battery.”

In the midst of it, though, he chit-chatted with a very scary “digital assistant” named DAG (I think it must stand for Digital Assistant Golem) on the screen, whose voice freaked me out in the exact way HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey” always does.

After helping Mundie with a bunch of stuff, I am guessing DAG went off into the computer to work on a secret plan to kill off the human race.

Well, it was nice being here for this long on our little blue planet, Earth!

So, while we wait for DAG to destroy us, here’s the video demoing Natal that Bach showed to the audience, which is not new, but still pretty cool:

With all the attention given to Facebook and MySpace, it’s hard for other social-networking sites to get much attention, unless–like Bebo–they manage to sell themselves off to a big company for an ungodly amount of money.

Still, many smaller sites are chugging along, such as the San Francisco-based hi5 Networks, trying to build strong niche businesses and find other means of making money besides the still unproven advertising space.

In hi5’s case, that has recently meant a push into virtual gifts using virtual money, which is bought with the real kind. The company hopes to let members buy other goods and services in the future in this “coin” system.

The hi5 service, which is much more internationally popular, especially in Spanish-speaking countries (where it is often the No. 1 site), is also testing out mobile efforts, avatars and virtual worlds, all in an effort to set itself apart.

It currently claims 56 million unique visitors every month, with offerings in 27 languages.

Here’s a video of a tour I did of hi5’s offices in San Francisco recently, along with an interview with CEO Ramu Yalamanchi, who founded the company in 2003, talking about all this and more:

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s an interview I did with Activision Chairman and CEO Bobby Kotick about the state of the gaming business.

The video of the interview is in three parts.

It’s a good week to focus on the gaming industry since Electronic Arts (ERTS) abandoned its hostile acquisition bid for Take-Two Interactive (TTWO) over the weekend.

EA’s effort was motivated, in part, by Activision’s recent merger with Vivendi Games, which includes Blizzard Entertainment’s “World of Warcraft,” one the most popular multi-player games.

The merger has made Activision (AVTI), with its own well-known franchises–especially the hugely popular “Guitar Hero,” which debuted version IV at D6–one of the gaming industry’s largest companies.

In this second video, Kotick talks about virtual goods and in-game advertising, the international market, set-top boxes, violence and “Grand Theft Auto,” the competitiveness of the gaming business, the situation at Yahoo (he was, until recently, a board member), and takes a question from the audience about social gaming.

Our very own John Paczkowski channels some of the Holy Spirit–but this time for the glory of Apple’s iPhone, which debuts Friday–in his Digital Daily video.

The fire and brimstone aside, the hype over what AT&T is calling “iDay” is going to get pretty rollicking over the next few days, especially as reviews of what some are calling the “JesusPhone” come out, including from our own Walt Mossberg on this site and on WSJ.com.

Here is a direct link to today’s video, which is also below (we’re a full-service linker here at AllThingsD.com).

Here is his text post about it in Paczkowski’s Digital Daily column.

He also posts on the aftermath of the recent Google-eBay bickering, which seems not to have ended too well for Google, and the possible tax on virtual worlds.