i have noticed a lot of freezing myself, so much so that i have stopped playing Skyrim on the Xbox. I am not going to risk damaging it turning it off all the time because it froze(thats exactly what will happen if you keep freezing it up and turning it off will damage the hardware)
its not my console thats less then a year old, i can play Dantes Inferno, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Darksiders, Call of Duty, etc for hours and never get a single freeze...so its Skyrim thats causes it.
of Course Skyrim shows all the symptoms of faulty garbage collection....that means it doesnt free memory like its supposed to...otherwise known as a memory leak...thats what causes the freezing...its a downright shame they refuse to fix it...thats pretty much the problem.
I play it on pc, but i got dual graphics cards and 16 gb of ram so its not as noticeable, but a memory leak/faulty garbage collection on a console is just the kiss of death....once the save file gets so big the garbage collection borks the game.
im selling my Xbox copy this weekend..i refuse to damage my Xbox by locking it up like that. on the pc you can just task manager kill the process without hurting your hardware..there is no such option on the 360.
its a shame i cant even finish dawnguard on any of my characters, even my level 11 assassin has freezes that just breaks it for me...its not worth having to hold the power button on my console risking hardware damage every time.
just remember, everytime you have to pull the plug or hard power off your xbox could b the last.....you can ruin a perfectly good xbox doing that....damage the motherboard in the xbox.
I once played a buggy game on a brand new PS2, I restarted the console well over 200 times due to lockups and terminal bugs, the PS2 is still going strong over 10 years later. You wait a bit before restarting, it is only if you think you can just switch it off and back on immediately you risk damage. You turn your console on and off all the time, suprisingly they do actually make them to withstand that, since they expect you to be doing it a lot. You could have just turned the autosaving off and played the XBox 360 version, it never freezes on a manual save. The occasional lock up due to loading problems is not that frequent.