Well it's not rocket science to service these things, but it sure could be a whole lot easier.
The iMac has changed the location of it's memory at least twice (three times now?), and none of them are that accessible. Taking a reasonably heavy 24" iMac and tossing it on it's face on the table (put down a towel first or you'll scratch it!), two extra tiny screws to release the panel on the bottom edge and about fifteen minutes fiddling with those silly rubber circles. I have done it lots of times but it doesn't compare to the Mac Pro.
The mini needs shims to get it open and although I am fairly deft, opening an easily scratched plastic case with shims without scratching it is next to impossible. There's no reason in the world the mini couldn't be as easy to open as say.. an Apple TV. It's almost the same form factor anyway.
I guess you could say it's a slight improvement from the iMac G4 which needed a special screwdriver as well as dealing with heat conducting paste just to add memory? Or the extremely heavy, rounded iMac G3 that had to be flipped on it's back? Come to think of it has there ever been an iMac that doesn't require you to flip over it's weirdly shaped bulky self, and put it screen down (!) on the workbench to get at the memory?
I didn't really include the laptops in my comment, but now that you mention it, have you tried changing the memory on a MacBook lately? Having it under the keyboard on previous models was brilliant. Taking out the battery and that little shim-corner thingie with the three screws and then pulling the cards out of the side slots is NOT an improvement. It's nice that you can get at the hard drive easier, but everything else is a step backward.
Don't get me wrong, I love Apple's designs, but I think it's a pretty well-known fact that these original designs are not as practical to service as a tower. The Mac Pro made huge advances in serviceability last time, it would be nice to see a bit of that with the iMacs is all I am saying. Several people have posted on this very thread as to how cool it would be to have pluggable SATA drives on the iMac like on the Pro, so it can't be just me that's thinking this.
