I did the software base station thing for quite a while. My problem with it was in my home the range was not close to the range with my WAP. I used to have no signal in my living room which is about 35 feet away down a hallway. With my WAP. I have 92% percent signal at my front door which is about 60 feet away.
Plus, I had to let everyone in my home with wireless know that I was restarting. I also had problems with time to live and the advertisement period.
I would not get the apple base station. I have a netgear G-router that I use as a access point only, my gateway is a hi-end business model also made by netgear.
I have friends who've had luck with buffalo. AFAIK the buffalo stuff is essentially the same internals as apple stuff. A friend of mine hacked his base station and attached the buffalo omnidirectional antenna. I stuck with netgear because I had the netgear gateway for business purposes.
In all, the SWBS was a good band-aid while in a money crunch but usability and performance was suffering tremebdously.
As always, sorry for the long post.