This is a great post. Just about everything that was bothering me has been covered. I have PM'd a number of people to get advice and now its all collated in one place. Ronnie has been particularly helpful and patient with regards to answering what to some people are going to be obvious questions.

I vote we make this a sticky.

By the way. The updated OSX (Lion) is expected any time soon, in fact macrumors.com are thinking it will be this week. With it will be an updated MacMini. Hence Im holding out from actually buying all this stuff, but Im going MacMini, Halide Bridge and Pure Music with Apple Remote on the iPad.

M owner since '97