I thought the hardware was way too underpowered for that sort of thing, hence the price. screens are expensive, but that wouldn't explain the > $300 price difference the apple tv and an iphone or ipad. now an apple tv 2...

edit: the ipod touch is only $229, but that's still $129 more than apple tv. anyone have more info about the possibilities of apps?

The current Apple TV contains the same cpu and graphics chip, and amount of memory as the iPad[1]

Given that the iPad has decent games performance at 1024x768, I could see the Apple TV handling most iPad games at 720p, or running them at a lower resolution and upscaling (as the consoles do with many games, for example Halo 3/ODST[2] and GTA IV[3]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV#Technical_specificatio...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_3#Graphics

[3] http://www.ripten.com/2008/04/29/confirmed-gta-iv-ps3-is-not...

How about now? Did you see that you can play The Incident on TV via iPhone and iPad TV out?

http://www.ipodnn.com/articles/10/12/02/the.incident.uses.ip...

Man, if an App store comes to an Apple TV with any kind of decent input device that really would be a gold mine (complete with gold rush for devs).

This input device is, of course, your iPhone or iPod touch. The decent-ness of said device is questionable, however.

(But, it'd be perfect for Angry Birds TV!)

Touch controls would have to be pretty limited due to the lack of tactile feedback, but I could see some motion-based controls (though an ipod/iphone is a pretty expensive gadget to be swinging around).