That's not quite the same situation as hardware hacking - DirectTV's countermeasures basically come down to detecting fraud and disabling the users, not preventing it completely.
What just about all consumer electronics companies have failed to do is lock down their hardware from being hacked in the first place - after all, Sony and Apple also pay some of the best in the world, and the PS3 and iPhone have been cracked wide open with software.
Microsoft is certainly better than most (the 360 doesn't yet have a software patch - there are hardware solutions - that can be used for piracy), but they are by no means immune to hackers.
I believe you're wrong about the nature of DirectTV's countermeasures, although we may be in a semantic tar pit here. The measures DirectTV took to stop the emulators were very, very technical; they involve encryption at the level of HDL.
What just about all consumer electronics companies have failed to do is lock down their hardware from being hacked in the first place - after all, Sony and Apple also pay some of the best in the world, and the PS3 and iPhone have been cracked wide open with software.
Microsoft is certainly better than most (the 360 doesn't yet have a software patch - there are hardware solutions - that can be used for piracy), but they are by no means immune to hackers.