Has Apple TV come of age?

Last week Apple updated it's Apple TV product with a factory fitted 160Gb Hard Disk option, but does this new addition mean that it will finally find some more homes?

Well, I certainly think it makes it more attractive to users but I'm not sure that this upgrade alone justifies it. Why?

1. Here in the UK the iTunes Store has little, or no, video content.
   
2. Ripping DVD's takes an age: Using the x264 codec to rip and encode a DVD may take as long as it would to watch the DVD. So why not just watch the DVD?
3. Staying with DVD, would it really been so hard, or expensive to include a DVD drive?
4. Why HD only? The audio isn't HD (and by that I mean 24Bit/96 (or192Khz)Khz) and, for now, it's only likely to be user generated content (photo's and iMovies) that are HD.

Having said all that I think that Apple are working towards a longer term goal and certainly this if I had enough time to create content for it I'd be quite happy to buy one.