+1. We are a household of sysadmins/engineers. Sure I or my wife could design a PC for media in an afternoon - but I don't want to deal with it.
An apple TV was a no fuss, no headache media box that can interface with the servers that store my media.
I use it a fair bit. Mind, it's something like formating a giant json stdout into something I want to read...
I also do find it's useful for sketching out an outline In pseudo code.