+1. We are a household of sysadmins/engineers. Sure I or my wife could design a PC for media in an afternoon - but I don't want to deal with it.
An apple TV was a no fuss, no headache media box that can interface with the servers that store my media.
Id say if it's in your budget - get one. We have no other apple products in the house but that. The biggest annoyance was making an apple account (for some stupid reason they require it...)