I gained more features out of the box like commercial skip, flawless recording of my shows, and no quality loss.

I've got all those with the DirecTivo. The commercial skip is a hidden feature that I activated with the select-play-select-3-0-select command on the remote, but the others are just there by default.

I don't know what you mean by "flawless" recording, but in terms of quality, that's one of the nice things about having the integrated satellite tuner: The video is a direct stream to the hard disk from the satellite. No intermediary conversion or transmission happening.

Not that it matters much since the DirecTV data is compressed way past the point of tolerable for me and looks like crap to begin with.