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As far as your original post, I have Revos and atv2's at my house.
Revo on my main TV and ATV2's in the bedrooms and computer room.
For me they both are ideal for the purpose they are used for.
The livingroom unit needs more horsepower as that is my most used box, and works a bit faster than the ATV's do.
It also handles viewing fairly large photo files from my Nikon camera better than the ATV.
That said, the ATV's are perfect units for the bedrooms and would probably satisfy most people as a main box.
Picture quality is good, they are very quiet, built in netflix app is a big plus, very low power usage, and easy to use.
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The point of HTPCs is if you want something custom.
For example I have a fanless HTPC that is powerful enough to play 1080p on its CPU. No nettop can do that.
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Well personally I'm also using it as a server (and a NAS) and 18TB of storage wouldn't fit in an iSomething I'm afraid. But you already listed this in the TS.
Other reasons could be that you have some fairly old hardware lying around that you want to put to good use. With a very cheap upgrade (video card) you can already turn it into an HTPC more powerful than an ATV, ION2 or Fusion. Well, at least as long as you have PCI-E.
Or that you have a HD camera yourself, which outputs at at least 720p50 up till 1080p60. Those nice, quiet cheap embedded things just can't handle them all (yet). Or do proper deinterlacing on 1080i.
But other than that, yeah, I guess most people would be satisfied with a smaller form factor solution. Although I have to say I also consider those Asrock, Zotac and Acer boxes to be PC's, and when they're used for Home Theatre they're HTPC's, in my book. The form factor or the fact they they're not hand assembled isn't really an indicator for the term HTPC, imho. But that's just nitpicking.
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Short version
I use one HTPC because in my main Theater since there were no low-cost clients available at the time I bought it. I use another HTPC in my Living Room because it was built from spare parts and is not used very often. I use ATV2s in the Master Bedroom and Kids' Bedroom because they are cheap, easy to setup, and perform excellently for those locations.
Long Version
I'm not sure if I'm in the minority or the majority, but I use XBMC with minimal customization. I like Confluence (especially horizontal). I enable hardware decoding and adjust for overscan. I install a handful of streaming add-ons (Icefilms, Hulu, FreeCable). I let Ember take care of scraping. Eventually I'll do MySQL. That's it... pretty basic by the standards of many folks here.
What I do want is multiple inexpensive low-power clients with identical UI and functionality distributed throughout the house. I like the Kaleidescape model but the hardware costs and restrictions are absurd. I currently have 4 screens with a 5th and maybe 6th to be added in the not-to-distant future. As such, the ATV2 is ideal for my secondary screens (Master Bedroom, Kids' Bedroom, etc) and would actually work fine for my primary screen as well (see below).
I still have an HTPC (Athlon II X2 + GT210) in my Theater because there were no inexpensive client options available at the time I bought it. I had eventually planned on adding a BD-Drive and integrating TMT5, but the amount of physical discs I watch has decreased so drastically that it's no longer a priority, and I still have a decent stand-alone BD player for when I do. Since my projector is 720p and I don't have plans to upgrade to a 1080p projector any time soon, I could use an ATV2 and be just as happy. Even if I did upgrade to a 1080p projector, most of my media is 720p anyway. Since going to ATV2 in the rest of the house, the main reason the HTPC remains in place is just laziness.
I also have an HTPC in the living room, but it's a cobbled together P4 + 8400GS that I built from spare parts and it's also the least watched screen in the house. It's hidden away in a TV cabinet and never seen/heard, so it's indistinguishable in operation from the ATV2s elsewhere in the house. I may eventually replace it with an ATV2, but the reasons above also make this a low priority.
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I think a lot of people still have $200 in mind as the price point for the Revo, even though the Revo AR1600s (Single-Core, Ion LE) are long gone.
. Weird cause I have googled and looked through many sites to extend my network and never came
