These kinds of 'PC's are quickly becoming more common, they have a couple out now that are the size of a USB thumb drive, and connect directly to HDMI displays.
These are actually perfect for sticking behind your TV.... Full media player, plus lob on a keyboard and mouse.... Another PC... debian's not that bad...
Not to try to eclipse the Rasberry Pi, but I found the o-droid X the other day. Definitely aimed at a different market point than the Rasberry Pi. The Pi is 35, the odroid is 129, but the odroid is a quard core 1.4ghz CPU a compact flash slot and 6 USB port so it's a big brother and only slightly larger.
The PI's 700mhz processor is pretty slim on processing speed for a PC type application's outside of web browsing where the odroid quad 1.4ghz is enough for even a gaming system.
You won't see me doing anything with it for at least a month. It's still in the package and that's where it's going to stay until my schedule slows down.
i was away for a while and now i see my raspberry pi is here. spent a day learning linux and playing with various settings. looks good but it is slow. the only programming software on it is python. that may be good platform to learn (never used it) but i'm rather interested in something else (compiler, RAD...). is there such thing in linux? i looked at FPC and Lazarus, looks cool but not sure if it can run smoothly on puny RPI. supposedly it can cross compile so i installed it but the target libraries are not included. i guess they must be available somewhere but it will be lots of work to get it going. also looked at monodevelop. i like the idea that one can develop .NET app and use mono as framework. but there seem to be some compatibility issues about floats. so what do you guys use and what do you recommend?