Marc over at the Inq discusses what will need to happen if Intel truly wants its VIIV branding to succeed. I totally understand where he's coming from, but at the same time, I've got an HTPC in a mid-tower case happily sitting in my living room that my wife uses almost everyday ;)

"So, along came Media Center PCs, the first batch of which looked exactly like normal PCs but ran an OS more user-friendly to the TV/VCR generation. Unfortunately, they failed the girlfriend/wife test too. And their marketing was crap. And they were still too complex. And too expensive. And (and this is the last ‘And’), it didn’t help that the bulk of the running was left up to PC builders and Microsoft, with Intel forking out little more than lip service over the past three years."