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In terms of PC development (excluding Xbox and Zune),
What is the difference between XNA and C# DirectX? Does C# DirectX have a significant advantage over XNA (in terms of speed, royalties, etc)?
How are the two compared to the speed unmanaged C++ DirectX?
Where is the industry moving in terms of game programming?
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XNA is not a wrapper around unmanaged DirectX. It does use parts of DirectX but it is not a wrapper.
By the time the next generation of consoles released, XNA had been abandoned, but Monogame came in to take its place, and it had support for PlayStation 4."
While XNA is officially dead as far as Microsoft is concerned, MonoGame says it will continue to support XNA developers going forward. XNA devs can continue using the same tools they already have and, thanks to its SharpDX backend, can even publish to Windows 8, which otherwise doesn't support XNA.
If you understand what you need to do to make a game, you can port it to any platform with ease. Also, if a game is on the Xbox Live Arcade, then it has been developed with XNA. XBLA is a great platform to push out indie games, so for a beginner with (what I assume) is a small team, I'd recommend it.
If you're actually good at writing unmanaged code, then you'll probably be able to write a faster graphics engine on top of DirectX. However, for the hobbyist, XNA has plenty of performance, both for 2D and 3D game development.
Here is a good Channel 9 video where they run an XNA-built racing game on Xbox 360. It runs well even at full HD. Several of the XBox Live Arcade games have been developed by the XNA community.
As far as C# DirectX, as I recall, Managed DirectX as it was called, is no longer officially supported since XNA basically replaces it. I could be wrong, its been a very long time since I looked at it.
The performance differences are negligible between XNA and Managed DirectX since, in essence they're the same thing; XNA just has a few convenience bits to reduce the amount of boilerplate code you need to write.
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