I think what would really rule would be the Rio Central codebase (+LAME) running on an Epia fanless wonder with a touchscreen TFT hooked up. Sort of like the dev platform I was thinking of for Central II.
Except for the fact that Epia fanless wonders come in nicer cases than the one the mucking funkies who designed Rio Central came up with, what's all that bad about the Central's existing platform? Proper ethernet would be good but apart from that it's pretty much sorted.

Peter