AppleTV

I finally bought my first Apple product, an AppleTV2. I've always dreaded owning an Apple product and being tied to iTunes because when I worked at iTOK our top issue from customers (several calls per day) was having to fix iTunes. iTunes seems to work great on Macs, but always seems to have issues on Windows, and even more issues on Windows 64-bit (which I run on both my machines).
I spent the first evening with the AppleTV spending about 4 hours trying to get iTunes to recognize the AppleTV so I could upgrade it. Every time I was lucky enough to get iTunes to see it and start the update, it would fail mid-update leaving the AppleTV un-bootable. I decided to bring it to work the next day where I have a 32-bit Windows box setup. The 32-bit drivers seem to work much better and I was able to restore it and even jailbreak it (freeing me from the awful grasp of iTunes).
When I got the box back home, I was able to put XBMC on it, so it can now play any type of video format I throw at it (without transcoding into an Apple-friendly format). I added all my Movies and TV shows over the network, which it spent the night scraping the metadata and info on, and now those are all nicely categorized and displayed. I then added plugins to XBMC to access Pandora and Groovshark for music, and IceFilms, Cartoon Network, Yahoo Music Videos, and Youtube for video. Basically, almost everything we want can now be accessed just through XBMC. If we exit XBMC and go to the standard AppleTV menu, we also have access to Netflix streaming. So, for $99 (surprisingly affordable for an Apple device) I now have access to all the media I could really want. I am now convince that the (jailbroken) AppleTV is the best, most affordable, simple streaming set-top box (as long as you have a 32-bit Windows box or a Mac to set it up initially).