I have an apple TV3.

We have a 6 year old LED TV which does freeview. I have a basic blueray player/dolby 5.1 system which the ATV is plugged into using optical cable. Nothing else. I subscribe to Netflix.

We do not watch much TV, but stream Netflix most of the time. I know I could watch it on my iPad, which I do sometimes, or on a PC, but it is great to watch it on the big screen.

iplayer/5OD/4OD/itv player etc, I AirPlay from mac or iPad.

If we watched a lot of TV etc and spent much time in front of the screen then there might be something else out there more suitable, but for the time being, it all works fine for us.

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I stream a lot of stuff from my Mac on to my Tv using it.

Find it quite useful, was a present (I asked for it as not a thing I'd normally buy but knew I'd get some usage out of it).

A luxury not a must have

I have my MacBook Pro connected to my tv with AirPlay installed, which in effect turns the MacBook into a Apple TV. I can steam audio / video to the tv that way

How long ago was it since you last tried it? Earlier versions used no hardware acceleration at all. Newer versions are still partially software accelerated but are beginning to use hardware acceleration. Still not a speed demon though... Cheap as hell is a massive plus point. £30-£35 for a model B, an ethernet cable or USB wifi adaptor, HDMI cable and a phone charger. All you need. If you go wifi rather than ethernet you could get away with the cheaper model A maybe although it does have half the ram, not sure how much that would impact xbmc, I would guess alot. Which is another point, revision 1 or revision 2 pi? revision 2 model B pis have 512mb ram instead of the 256 of the revision 1 (and model A)

To be fair it was one of the earliest model Bs, preordered on announcement of the Pi.

Not really worth it. Had one since November and used it just a hand full of times. It doesn't really offer anything you can't get from other places, apart from seeing your photo stream on the tv but that isn't really too important in my opinion.

The wi-fi connection is also quite poor, even with the box less than a foot away from the router, it won't connect and when it does finally connect after doing a restart, it loses connection 5 mins later.

Known fault and free replacement available from apple.

Personally I would go with a basic xbmc setup. While this can be done with OpenElec on a Pi don't go down this route, try something like an acer Revo running OpenElec, or an older PC, anything that has a pcie slot that can take a budget GPU that's dxva compliant will output av over HDMI and is a pleasure to use. Add a Flirc or similar to let you use your existing remote (PulseEught CEC is another option though personally I prefer Flirc) or use the mobile apps and you're sorted. A number of free online streaming services exist if you are so inclined or it'll play back LAN and local content with ease.

I have one and its rubbish, it's a atv3 and as others have said, it has no storage, I bought several films on iTunes so I could watch them on the ATV or my ipad as I thought it was better than having physical DVDs however some of the have is appeared from my list of purchased items and according to tech support, it's my problem, not there's. it's my responsibility to buy a hard drive to store them on instead of relying on the cloud. So fair enough I said, I'm not going to kick up a stink and instead I'm just refusing to buy anything else from iTunes.

Known fault and free replacement available from apple.

Personally I would go with a basic xbmc setup. While this can be done with OpenElec on a Pi don't go down this route, try something like an acer Revo running OpenElec, or an older PC, anything that has a pcie slot that can take a budget GPU that's dxva compliant will output av over HDMI and is a pleasure to use. Add a Flirc or similar to let you use your existing remote (PulseEught CEC is another option though personally I prefer Flirc) or use the mobile apps and you're sorted. A number of free online streaming services exist if you are so inclined or it'll play back LAN and local content with ease.

whilst I will most probably give OpenELEC a look is that really comparable to going to a shop, buying an AppleTV and just plugging it in? not everyone wants to fanny about with getting things to work

It's not that simple in reality. If you plug in your ATV in you have nothing. It's useless without an iTunes account and an internet connection. Give it both of those and you can still only play content you purchase from apple and due to the regional breakdown you'll want a US itunes account ideally. Want to play media you may have ripped from your own media collection? Tough. You need to either buy it again (potentially the 4th or even 5th time: VHS, LD, DVD, BR and now iTunes) or have a computer to run iTunes on and import your content, but even then it's transcoded so the quality drops and the power requirements get silly for no good reason.

Now lets say you shove OpenElec or xbmc on an old PC, it'll either cost you very little or you may already have the hardware, CPU isn't an issue (my old box was based on an atom) and an entry level GPU will handle hardware acceleration so it'll play local content and can store content, if you prefer to run a full OS you can turn it into a file server/download box with things like your Couch Potato/SABZ/Sick Beard monitoring your Dropbox downloads folder allowing you to trigger downloads using your home connection if that's your thing or install a simple plugin that will give you access to a massive online archive of TV and movies legally and if you're that way inclined, not so legally. It can also handle ripping/encoding duties (great if like me you had hundreds to do) before boxing them up for the loft. Little tip: check the boxes you use will go through the loft hatch first

For reference I own a Mac mini, iPhone, iPad and ATV2 so it'd be fair to say i'm pretty well invested in the apple ecosystem and have been for years, it's been a good 18 months since I touched my ATV, my htpc is used daily, that has to tell you something.