I did end up deciding on MCE 2005, however not for a media computer but for my regular PC (which has a TV tuner that I use for recording some programs). I'm not overly thrilled with the quality of recorded TV, I honestly think my old All In Wonder had better recording quality with a smaller resulting file (I'm using an ATI 550-based tuner which is reputed to be one of the better ones).

Based on the quality I certainly wouldn't want to use it as my primary TV or DVR system, however the *rest* of MCE is quite good with a lot of nifty features.