Yeah, I have the alarm clock sorted. A diskless Myth frontend connected to a cron job that does wakeonlan, starts playing music and then ramps the volume up gently....

I was looking at these as 'ancilliary' controllers - maybe showing snapshots from webcams; email notification for 'important' emails; recipes in the kitchen sounds do-able on one of these; just having one to use as a tiny intelligent device would allow home automation to be do-able away from the home PC.
Asterisk client? velcro on a tiny usb webcam and you may have a video phone...

Ideally they'd be dockable - have a few cheap docks around the house; just recharging stands, nothing else - then you could pick it up to do stuff without a wire. So long as they'd last an hour off the dock that would be fine.