After selling our first-generation AppleTV a while back, I purchased the new 3rd gen 1080p version a couple months ago. We love it, and it is working great with the whole ecosystem.
There are holes, however, in the content. Obviously Apple has a TV, Movie and Music store that they do not want to cannabalize, but there is plenty of content available on the web that you can’t easily access on AppleTV.
If I were a betting man, I would place good money on Apple bringing the App Store concept (subscriptions and all) to the AppleTV in the coming months. The new grid of icons on the homescreen is just screaming for awesome 3rd-party apps.
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I personally think the (original) Apple TV is a non-starter for a number of reasons, but I was forced to get a connected TV recently due to a remodel and have been more-or-less happy with the all-in-one Sony GoogleTV. And it even has a number of other advantages then the purported AppleTV that has yet to be released.
One of the biggest pluses of the Google TV is that it only needs a power cord. I can access my TiVo, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, ESPN3, Pandora, Spotify, Google Music and any other Honeycomb app all on the TV. You can do some of those things with the current Apple TV, but not a lot of them.
Plus it supports all sorts of streaming protocols (mkv) that Apple does not.
So while I never count Apple out of anything, I just don’t see them securing the licenses they need to make their walled-garden approach competitive with Google from a features standpoint, even if they have it beat in terms of UI.
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