Rui CarmoMark nails it, as usual: “Buy it for what it is, or don’t buy it at all.” And he bought nearly the same model DVD player I got for a relative. For me, the Apple TV is pretty much dead.
In a year or so, when it finally makes sense to buy an HDTV, I’ll just get a similar DVD player for myself and, if they don’t come with an Ethernet port and a Samba client by then, I’ll just buy another 4GB USB stick - by then there will probably be a sane online video market that will let me just download whatever I want in a cross-platform format and let me view it wherever I want.
And even if that takes a couple of years, Apple has already shown it suffers from NIH syndrome to the point where it will never support other video formats but its own, so they’ve already lost me as a customer.