On balance, I think I also would recomend the 17" iMac. But it sounds like it comes down to price (it always does for me, anyway).
But your story is very interesting to me, as I did exactly what you are proposing a year or so ago. I had an ancient PII running XP, 384mb of memory, not much disk: but I did have a decent monitor, etc. The solution was a mini (1.66Ghz Duo - the instore upgraded machines have 1Gb ram and a larger disk).
Considering that I use it for all sorts of high-ish end things (like running XP under parallels, Matlab codes with large data files, etc), it runs extremely well. Google Earth too.
As for waiting for upgrades, etc: I long ago stopped worry about such things, otherwise you'd never do anything!
Hope this helps your decision!
But your story is very interesting to me, as I did exactly what you are proposing a year or so ago. I had an ancient PII running XP, 384mb of memory, not much disk: but I did have a decent monitor, etc. The solution was a mini (1.66Ghz Duo - the instore upgraded machines have 1Gb ram and a larger disk).
Considering that I use it for all sorts of high-ish end things (like running XP under parallels, Matlab codes with large data files, etc), it runs extremely well. Google Earth too.
As for waiting for upgrades, etc: I long ago stopped worry about such things, otherwise you'd never do anything!
Hope this helps your decision!
or wrong 
choice. 
