"One of my contacts said Asimov is a system that the Xbox team originally built and used during its development process."
I don't see why you'd need to facepalm the Xbox team using a codename from the Halo series, or why it's so headshaking that the larger Windows team would adopt a tool from the Xbox team they found useful.
It's about as depressing as people 5000 years from now thinking that most of what 21st century people knew about birds was disseminated using an ancient application called Angry Birds.
1) http://www.zdnet.com/how-the-next-version-of-ie-codenamed-sp... 2) http://www.geek.com/games/microsoft-taps-the-halo-franchise-...
Not everything with the same name is the same thing, and it's possible to reference the second in a series of shared names that itself is referencing the first.
References aren't transitive, in this case.