I think we're all behind the idea, it's the execution that's giving us pause. At least me.

The Apple TV *is* a Mac. It's somewhat stripped and somewhat augmented in other areas. It's likely running OS X in some locked-down fashion, but I don't think it will stay that way forever. It's ripe for hacking and I would have a hard time believing Apple spent too much time preventing that from being possible.

Its specs indicate that you can only access movies that have been synced and this is limited to 50 hours worth due to the size of the included HD. So it doesn't make a good front end to an large server or file store of ripped DVDs. I'm fairly confident it doesn't play video TS folders so you'd likely have to transcode anyway.

Without support for DivX and Xvid a lot of content, both ill-gotten and legitimate is also cut out. I think it will eventually provide a nice vehicle for Apple to sell video content, but unlike iTunes, it doesn't seem like it will suppoort user-supplied video as well. It may simply require a third-party program to properly format all the meta-data for iTunes and a transcoding run, I don't know yet.

Most PVR software has some type of media streaming or serving capacity, whether it be MythTV, SageTV or BeyondTV. Hmm, I'm noticing a pattern in these product names. The sad part is most of their UIs suck. I'm not that pleased with AppleTV's interface either though. It's not a slick as what I had mocked up for a project that unfortunately didn't take off. Hopefully they'll enhance it with updates as time goes on.

I'm also a bit surprised they didn't include support for 480i. Though they may have gone with a cut-down part lacking a TV encoder. It would have been nice to see 1080p (and i) out of that little box, even if they weren't going to sell video at that resolution yet. Probably missing due to slower than wanted decode rates of H.264.

It's going to completely doninate all other streaming/TV products without question. I expect it will take only a few weeks for it to completely eclipse all other devices' all-time sales (stuff like Netgear, Dlink, etc..)