Silly to rant against Apple for a rumored product they haven't announced. That said, this thing needs an ethernet port. I have terrible wifi signal near the tv due to a fireplace/chimney. I've got it wired with gigabit already for PS3 and mac mini.
Has to have a USB port for an external hard drive. Cable modem can go down, my laptop could be out of the house, etc. Incidentally, I like the itunes sync of the apple TV for music, hate having to manually push new music to the mac mini I have. For video, I don't want it on my laptop, so I'd just want to push it.
I'd love if podcast viewing data was synced over mobile me. I may have a podcast, even in different resolutions, on iPhone, laptop, apple tv, etc. If I watch on one device and/or delete, be nice for that to happen on all devices. (with preference setting to turn off)
Time capsule stores critical information and is not very robust. Bad idea to turn it into a media streamer. If it had a software raid 1 and I could add a USB drive that it backed up to automatically, then fine. As it stands the failure rate of TC is high, so I'm glad the hard drive on it is spun down 95+% of the time.