Maybe (probably) I'm just biased, but I spent a few years trying to get MythTV, Satellite PCs, Silverstone chassis, Mediacenter, XBMC on a modded 1st gen XBox, etc etc working smoothly.
It was a nightmare. I don't ever ever never want to have to think about overscan again as long as I live.
For me to be interested it needs to be flawlessly plug & play.
This was a few years before HDMI output was available on videocards, so maybe that has already solved the problem.
But as a ~8 year Mac user who converted from Windows XP for Ruby I will never, ever buy another Windows PC. Ever. Never. I mean, my wife still has to occasionally open network settings to get her work laptop onto the network. And because it's an Airport Extreme, that never has to be rebooted (unlike the dozen other WAPs I had previously), it's never the network. Just her laptop. That's crazy. No way I'm letting that into my living room.
Pitch me a box and out of the box experience that is guaranteed to work as long as I keep it vanilla (which is all I want) and is otherwise a PS4 I have the ability to upgrade piecemeal... Yeah. I'm totally on board with that.
And if the price of entry is pushing $600+, I'm probably OK with that too. That's what I paid for an 80GB PS3 on release day after all. I don't think I could make the mental leap past $999 though. ;-)
Price isn't my primary concern. Plug & Play access to a top-notch gaming environment is.
Honestly the PS4 may be a better fit, but the ability to swap out circuit boards on a SteamMachine is appealing. And the game library. If I could play DOOM and System Shock on my TV without spending as much time getting it working as playing I'd be pretty stoked.
The plug-and-play thing has never really worked. However not having to wait the normal generational time between consoles would be an advantage -- it was always baffling that each iteration of the 360 and PS3 (there were many of each) couldn't improve it in some way beyond making it smaller or lower power. GTA IV on the 360 had draw distance issues and would stutter mid-town -- it would have been nice if some GPU improvements in the 2nd and then 3rd edition eliminated that, etc, but the nature of that platform makes it so they can't.
