Well I got my AppleTV.  Hooked it up, synched up, and turned it on.  I would say its interesting, but probably not ready for primetime.   If you just want to listen to iTunes stuff on your home theater… and maybe put pictures on your flatscreen, it’s probably good for that.

It would be much cooler if you could buy TV shows right from the couch, but you can’t.  You have to buy them on iTunes, wait for them to download (not much Apple can do about that I suppose), and then watch them. 

So I bought the pilot of a new show called Supernatural.  It had good reviews on iTunes and seemed interesting.  It took a while to download, it was 464mb, but I watched it eventually.  It seemed to be the right aspect ratio, but not HD.  So it was a little dark, but not too bad.  All-in-all a reasonable experience.

But not really a wow experience.  It wasn’t so cool that I’ve downloaded 10 more shows.  I did try to buy 1 or 2 other shows because my crappy Scientific Atlanta DVR (PIECE OF SHIT) decided to only recorded 53 minutes of several shows rather than the whole show.  I still can’t get over how bad that thing is.

Anyway, my recommendation on the AppleTV is to wait until version 2.

Unless you have an addiction to shiny new technology gadgets… but in that case you probably already bought one.