I've read just about every thing I can find on Apple TVs (hacking and otherwise) and I'm totally sold on it. Hell, even if it ends up not working properly on my wife's SD Sony (it has component inputs but no wide screen squishing) I'll still get it.
There are a few things I really want Apple to enable (although I have no doubt they will all be hacked "on" in a few weeks). All of these can be enabled by Apple with a simple software update.
1: Surround sound. The Apple TV apparently has one of the best surround decoder chips you can get on the motherboard but it's disabled. True that most of what Apple sells isn't surround, but if they really want people to start taking advantage of other sources of getting videos (I don't mean the bad stuff like ripping DVDs... Okay, I do mean that a little) it's something that should be enabled. And promoted to sell more units.
2: Enabling the USB port for external hard drives (as a minimum) for additional storage. DVD players would be really sweet. Granted it's not the most elegent way to get a DVD player, but it doesn't hurt anything at all by giving you the option to connect a USB DVD drive into it. (Yes I am aware that storage isn't a huge deal on the Apple TV due to its ability to stream very well from 802.11g and up.)
3: A mode to output a artificially squished wide screen display to SD TVs without a 16:9 mode. Meaning show it as how you'd watch a wide screen DVD on a 4:3 TV by adding black bars so any TV with component out can use it. I'm not sure if it can be added solely in software though. This might not be possible without a different board design. But if they can do it in software why not? I mean if they tell people all you need is component input you can use it without a problem it will get a lot more people buying them instead of saying "I'm not sure because it may not work with my older TV with component and no wide screen mode" - like my TV.
4: I really hope they don't start adding protection from people altering the OS like they're doing now (installing new codecs, etc). It'll only hurt sales and cost money to implement. Who cares if someone does it? As long as they've bought it they already got their money. I couldn't buy movies/TV shows from the iTMS (Canada) in the first place anyway, so they aren't losing anything from me.
5: Possibly incorporate the Airport Express into it using software. Why not make it act just like it? It already streams music to it and most people will connect it to their home theater since more and more peoples' sound systems are simply what they're using on their TV. Sharing a printer and acting as a router (or even just a repeater for your network)? OS X can already do it so why not just enable it? Unless there's a performance problem with enabling those services on a "slow-ish" computer I don't see why they don't give you the option and tell people about it.
Feel free to correct any errors or suggest some other stuff you'd like to see on it.
PS Did you know that FrontRow on the Apple TV is named differently in the system files? It's called BackRow.