I absolutely agree! I think the price for the Central is just ridiculous. I use 2 Rio Receivers that sold at a great price and I always had plenty of responses to people asking why anyone would not just use a PC instead... The Central would be nice, but for 1500 it really IS much cheaper to buy a PC, even a notebook would do and not take much more space - but have a much better screen. Before shelling out 1500 bucks for the Central with a 40G HD, I would much rather do that!
I think discussing things as price here is not such a bad thing, since we ultimately deal with the technical side here mainly and those guys who have come up with these incredible products are totally dependent on the marketing arm of the company as far as sales are concerned. The one thing that we all want to avoid, I believe, is that the Central dies as fast as the Rio Receiver did!