The QWERTY remote was icing on the cake, to be honest.
Glad to see Samsung taking over; maybe now Netflix will work in the UK on it.
By far the two most frustrating aspects being the forced updates (which were often more buggy or broke features) and the lockups while in sleep. There was nothing more annoying than having to get up and hard reboot the thing every time I wanted to watch something.
Once the Pi and raspbmc became a viable alternative I quickly replaced my boxee boxes because, while not bug free by any means, they're much closer to "just working" than the boxee box ever was.
The one good thing I can say about the boxee box, though, is that its remote was a real treat. That thing worked like a charm.
As a bonus, XBMC interfaces with your TV's remote over hdmi, so you won't even need an extra remote, very wife / gf friendly.
Have you used a V2 Boxee box? Its honestly almost unusable and underpowered from both a software and hardware perspective, even the remote feels cheap. Their D-Link V1 box was a significantly better but they didn't make it, it cost twice as much as a Roku and was only a hundred bucks less then an Xbox which they couldn't compete with. So they tried to take on Roku on the low end and flubbed it badly.
The one thing boxee has always done better then anyone else is their XBMC overlay for playing back local (or network attached) media. This is also where Samsung lacks, if anything this should be where Boxee's talent can play a part.