>But wouldn't they expect it to be nearer $299... and beable to run lots of software?
Depends. Most people doing such things I know about are using MythTV. I'm one of them, using bog-standard PC stuff, and I've still easily spend about what his price range is, and am likely to spend even more on it. (Better case as I'm not happy with the Antec Overture one, more TV tuners with hardware MPEG encode, more hard drives, HDTV tuner, some sort of HDTV output card or SVGA/HDTV converter...)
Your $300 price, I spent more than that on hard drives alone. But I'm crazier than some.
