Pretty much. People have a fairly clear bias against watching anything
on your conventional PC. This probably has something to do with the way
the display ergonomics work; my best guess is that most people have their
PC's set up in a corner with a chair and a screen suitable for work at a
distance of a few feet. As a result, there's usually a clear delineation
between devices that are used as general purpose computers, and devices
that are used as specialized media display devices.
The "Mac Mini" may be an example of a device that can be used either way,
but do you know of many people that use it as a computer (and do all their
normal computing tasks) while it's hooked up to a large TV? Even Apple
acknowledged the legitimacy of this market by releasing AppleTV.
People generally do not want to hook their _computer_ up to televisions,
but rather they want to hook _a_ computer up to television so that they're
able to do things with their TV that an off-the-shelf product won't do for
them. That's an important distinction, and all of the examples you've
provided seem to be examples of the latter, rather than the former, which
is what I was talking about originally.
If you want to discuss the latter, then we've got to include a large field
of other devices, ironically including the TiVo, which are actually
programmable computers that have been designed for specific media tasks,
and are theoretically reprogrammable to support a wide variety of
interesting possibilities, and there we have the entry into the avalanche
of troubling operational issues that could result from someone releasing
software that distributes large amounts of content over the Internet, and
... oh, my bad, that brings us back to what we were talking about.
... JG