Hi Piyush,

This is an idea I've been considering for a while, for the same reasons 
you already outlined. Do you have any information on Asus Xtion Pro Live 
support? As far as I know:

* the OpenNI drivers supports the Asus directly (albeit not very 
robustly, depending on the Ubuntu version).
* the master branch of freenect does not support the Asus
* there exists a version of the freenect driver modified for the Asus [1]

I would be willing to contribute time for a stable driver which works 
seamlessly with both the Kinect and Asus hardware.

Cheers,

Ivan

[1] https://github.com/zarvox/libfreenect/tree/xtion