Will Kinect provide a low-budget solution for motion capturing? The first reviews showed that it's surprisingly precise and the body recognition works pretty well (well maybe except for very fast movements so recording some breakdancers probably won't work out)...

You can see some of its results in the following Youtube video and Kinect review (which especially has a nice low light test at a certain point):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BVnGorzu40
http://www.blisteredthumbs.net/2010/11/kinect-angry-video-review/

With people already getting their hands on it in order to make it work with the PC one of the first things that came to my mind was a nice basis for a low cost motion capturing system. What's your opinion on this?

Sounds great, after all those hacks for Mac and Windows it should be kinda like "easy" to read out the motion data and would give me a reason to buy Kinect.

Sounds good. Hopefully Microsoft won't be a bear of a company and will release the hardware specs openly to the software development community. Microsoft would actually benefit from this practice anyway; that is to say, they'd be in a very good business position. After all, many developers would then be making use of Kinect on many different platforms, in many different ways; and everyone who used those applications would end up going to Microsoft for the hardware to run them.

The best MoCap solution is Ipisoft Desktop Motion Capture. I already tried the Demo and this is just awesome!!

http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/index.html

that's quite cool.

Small update:
It seems some developers really hopped on that mocap idea and will offer a final solution soon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCu8KTrC4sc&feature=related

Another interesting name probaly is Asus Wavi Xtion which is a Kinect clone for the PC and will get free access for developers:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/01/wavi-xtion-asus-primesense/

Another framework to use Kinect on your computer is openNI.
Here is a link to the gallery:

http://www.openni.org/gallery

Ok - does someone have a Kinect ready to use with this software which is said to create BVH files out of it?

http://www.cgchannel.com/2011/01/new-app-exports-kinect-motion-data-as-bvh-files/

this is getting interesting.

But I first need to write a MED plugin which reads BVH... or is there sth like this already existing?

Sounds good.

It creates a bvh file. Now I must take a look how to use it.