I think some amount (~1hr) of research into this would’ve yielded the answer…
ROS + BBB is not the issue. BBB + Kinect + All-relevant-processing-on-the-BBB is 
One of the first to hack kinect this way was Philipp Robbel when he was @MIT. He had to resort to moving the processing of all kinect-generated data to a more powerful x86 laptop. Apparently, the kinect generates enough data to even choke the thruput-max of USB 2.0.
While the BBB can do so many things wonderfully, I think it is safe to say:
- it could choke receiving the data generated by kinect, even before it tries to process it. If your question was, “Can the BB do it all ?”, then minimal search for it seems to imply that is not possible. If you want to hand off the data to/from kinect to a laptop or some such, then you may be able to use the BBB for the low level control, etc.
- event if could handle the data-stream via USB, it could choke processing all that data (just 1 core at 1GHz). You may need a quad-core 1.7GHz SoC + 2GB-RAM to do it all local to the kinect/SoC.
A simple test of running X+gnome-sys-monitor @BBB pegged the cpu at a constant 80%. 'am no linux/kinect expert, but if I understood your question right, it looks like the BBB is not designed to directly interact with a kinect like device.
/venkat