What's the best reasonably priced streaming media hardware solution?

I have a friend who swears by Western Digital's WD TV Mini box. He works in a comic book shop, and has that playing b-movies and other things he's "purchased" and stored on a 1 TB hard drive.

The netflix streaming DVD works great in my roommate's PS3. I have a Mac Mini I use as well for playing back media. A Mac Mini is a bit pricy, but I find that iTunes plus the Finder makes for an excellent media center. In fact, I tried XBMC on it, and was not impressed at all.

We're currently going back and forth about this at my household too...

Personally I don't mind watching shows on my laptop. The bonus is everything (Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and general websites) works, and I can watch pretty much wherever I want, as long as I have Internet access.

But when more than one person wants to watch, that solution isn't enough. I can connect the laptop to our TV using a DVI-HDMI cable. Again this is OK for TV shows but when you want to watch something with better sound, then it's another cable to connect the laptop to the stereo. Then every time you want to change or tweak something, you have to hop up and run over to the computer. It's unwieldy and far from perfect.

The kids have it pretty good in our bonus room though. Currently they have a Wii and an Xbox 360. They use the Wii to stream YouTube and can get to a lot of content using the Opera browser that is bundled with that device. We have an Xbox Live paid membership so they use that system to stream Netflix movies (this service is coming to the Wii soon). The Xbox is new to our household so I haven't had a chance to check it out and see if it has other capabilities.

Our friends have a Roku and they are happy with it - but it doesn't stream in HD. I'm not sure if that's just the model they have, or if they are all like that.

Our TV and BluRay player both have Ethernet connections so I was hopeful that they'd have some sort of streaming capabilities... but as far as I can tell they are just for connecting to Sony and downloading updates. I think if I want to do more than that I have to shell out more $$ for a "Bravia Internet Connection" that connects to the TV. This will also stream Netflix and connects to Amazon for VOD. Can't tell if it can stream Hulu or YouTube though. As far as I can tell, it's apples to apples with the Roku, except it is HD quality.

Another (very expensive) recommendation has been to purchase a PS3. It has similar streaming capabilities to the Xbox and can play BluRay discs (and DVD's).

The one puzzle piece we're missing from any of those solutions is (sigh) sports. There are rumors that an ESPN channel for Xbox is on the way, but until my husband can reliably tune into football and golf we will have to maintain a "lifeline" cable account.

I'm interested to hear about what solution you decided on, and how the pieces are fitting together!