Apple wants to gear this thing towards one thing...iTunes rentals! Here's what is going to happen in the next year. Apple is still working on their deal with the music industry to offer unlimited music tiers. At that point, the new Apple TV will be set up to just surf the music you want to hear and play it. They've already moved towards TV show rentals. Jobs clearly sees the future as a big cloud pay service whereas Apple regularly empties your wallet each month for the rest of your life. They are less keen on letting you buy something once and pay it forever without paying for it again and again and again forever so the new device is moving away from that model (never was much towards it to begin with seeing as the old model doesn't support NAS without hacking either).
My new NetGear network supports UnPnP from a simple external Hard Disc. In other words, it becomes an NAS if you plug in a hard drive to it. That would be pretty sweet to run instead of leaving my Mac running 24/7.
The thing is that Steve wants iTunes running all the time since it's spying into your world and secretly telling Apple everything you do in iTunes which they will use for future ad targeting in 10.7 "Stealthy Kitty". The menu bar will be replaced with a new "Ad Bar" that sends targeted iAds to your Mac 24/7. If you do not click on at least one ad a week, your OS is wiped with a message that says "Bad Kitty!"