I bought an Intel NUC a week or two ago - If you haven't seen them they are an incredibly small form factor barebones pc Intel are making. Very nice looking, very small and great performers.

They take an mSata SSD, a mini pcie card for wifi/bluetooth, a sodimm and have 3 x USB, 2 x HDMI outputs and gigabit ethernet. The have Intel 4000 HD graphics. They come in Celeron or i3 models, the most expensive i3 one has 1 x HDMI and 1 x Thunderbolt.

I got the cheapest Celeron model, threw on Windows 8 and played a 720p MKV (didn't have a 1080 handy) with VLC figuring the hardware accelerating in VLC probably isn't as good as using Media player with the codecs installed and it played as smooth as silk. Even dynamically resizing the playback window and dragging it all over the screen while it was playing and it never missed a beat and CPU utilization never climbed above %20. We also ripped with keepvid.org a decent 1080p video and it played just as well.

They come with a plate to mount them on VESA mounts so you could mount it on the back of your TV - Make an amazing media player and pc to do youtube, google earth etc on your tv. You could even bang a USB dual tuner on it and record to either a network location or USB hard drive.

The unit will cost under $300 for the Celeron model, bang in an 8GB sodimm for under $100 ($50 for 4GB is probably enough) and an mSATA SSD (I installed win8 on a 24GB SSD, 14GB left to play with - I bough the box for a Linux project but wanted to try its media capabilities out).

Aside from the Linux appliance I'm looking at them for I figure the i3 will make a nice unit for your average business workstation, take up no desk space, have the tiniest quietest cooling fan spinning so slow its never going to fill with dust and when users shouldn't be saving to their C: drives they don't need a lot of storage so a 128GB SSD should be plenty (maybe even a 64gb).