NXE - Zune integration?

Sorry if you came here looking for bargains, but I thought I'd just post this very quickly.

I noticed today that the Zune Marketplace (and the Social and Forums) are going down for maintenance tomorrow starting 12:01, the same time that Xbox LIVE and all of those services are being brought down for maintenance. Of course, I don't really know how these services work - maybe they're intrinsically linked - but as far as I'm aware, these services have never gone down at the same time before.

Now, Zune software 3.0 was just released. Maybe it's down for that and maybe it's just a crazy coincidence. But given that this will bring Texas Hold-em and Hexic to the player, there's a lot of cross-talk between the two systems. J Allard runs the thing, even, and Larry Hryb compared the Zune Marketplace and LIVE Marketplace to each other in his most recent podcast.

It makes so much business sense for Microsoft to have the Zune Marketplace available on the 360. The overhead is so small that even if a tiny percentage of LIVE users buy a song, they'll be profiting from it. They already have all that infrastructure in place - the only thing standing in the way is linking the two and designing an interface for it. And there's a new interface coming in a month or so.

I have to consider that they want to link everything at some point. Your Zune tag is the same as your Gamertag, Microsoft Points are interchangeable between the two, and there's precendent with how the Windows Live ID is interwoven into everything. Last year was Windows Messenger integration - is this year Zune's turn?

Update: More coincidences and speculation here, thanks ace.