I installed Windows 7 Pro Final back in august (MSDNAA, gotta love it) and have been using my MacBook Pro to demo it off. The only quirk I have is a minor one. There is some driver that must not be 100% right because my machine will randomly detect and then eject some piece of hardware. I have nothing plugged in, but it makes the noises like I plugged something in then unplugged it. More of an annoyance than anything else. Otherwise, it works perfect, full VP2 with the nVidia 8600M GT included for H.264 video decoding through DXVA. I have many people interested after I gave a demo. They like the idea of dual-boot too, so I think I made some Mac sales in the process too.

It seems to be off to a nice rough start around my area. I have the converter boxes on the non-HDTVs and I went from having 11 or so channels to 2 channels. I have tried repositioning antennas, rescanning, and even bought some signal boosters, but nothing seems to make a difference.

Oh well, there's always Hulu.

Klipsch has the best speakers on the market and this would make a nice replacement to the cheap thrown-together mismatch system I have going on right now.

Ooh, I would love a nice shiny iPod touch.

I can haz storage?

Our surround system just went kaput and with the broken economy, this set would fix it for me! :D

I have always been a fan of CES. I really loved the ION platform though. I think it has killer potential.

http://creativeinfo.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/winxp-vs-vista-vs-win7/

I tested WinXP SP3, Vista SP1, and Win7 Beta 1 and used a stopwatch to time how long it took to do certain things (like install, boot, compress files, copy files, etc) and the link above is the chart of the results I poste don my blog.

The new MacBook (not Pro) may fit the bill if you don't need Firewire, otherwise I would go with a refurbished/recertified MacBook Pro.

If Apple isn't your thing, the Studio line of laptops from Dell has a BTO option Radeon 3450 graphics card, 4GB memory, and a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo sitting right under the $1000 mark and would do a fine job running all the things you mentioned above.

I just got a 360 after the price drop and am looking to build my library of awesome games, so that's where Baja comes in. The GPS would be nice because I have been trying to score one for at least 2 years and every time I finally get money saved up something happens and I have to start all over again. Kudos to Engadget for giving away such an awesome bundle!