After studying WHS intensively in the past few days, I think not.

The deal breaker for me is the redundancy model which, unless I badly misunderstand, is based on marking folders as redundant which results in all data within them being duplicated (similar to RAID 1 but on a selected basis).

I would like to have some protection for my media server but 2 to 1 storage cost is too steep for me.

My current inclination is toward the Lime Technology UnRAID server which uses (IMO) a much more acceptable redundancy model, similar to RAID 5 but with better power usage characteristics.

Since the media server aspect is the only part of the WHS product that interests me, that single point makes all the difference.

Ditto to what John said, except I'm sticking with my pre-existing Linux box.

If WHS v2 comes out with tuner farm and shared storage for WVMC, like Jess is talking about, I might consider it, even with the painful loss of storage - I guess I could offset a lot of the extra expense by making use of the "use any drive" feature and buy them on the super-cheap.

I am a WHS beta tester so I have experience with it.  I like what it offers.  Having a little headless appliance (such as the HP version) would be cool but for an enthusiast like me it just doesn't make sense to spend extra money for hardware that I already have laying around.  Therefore I will most likely build.  That will keep my investment low so if it doesn't live up to the hype I'm not out that much.

I have a WHS test box that I will upgrade with the RTM release.  But my box isn't exactly compact or sexy like the Velocity Micro unit.  So I probably will give it to a family member.  Hopefully the case and motherboard manufacturers get onboard quickly and make some hardware specific for WHS enthusiasts.  We need to find more motherboards that lose video/audio/pci slots and offer external gigabit ethernet, usb and esata ports...at a reasonable cost.  Losing internal components should allow for more creative case designs and lower power requirements.  Speaking of power, I'm shooting for a peak power requirement of 60 Watts.  My gut tells me that early on, OEM WHS builders like Velocity Micro will be the only ones to offer compact & power efficient designs at a far lower price then if I build it myself.

If it is enabled with Media Center and has a "tuner farm" type setup serving content to multiple extenders and other PCs then definitely yes!

I already have it, been testing since the RC, and its really great.  The big downside to unRAID is reduced write speeds.  With WHS, I can turn off the duplication on my movies and TV box sets, and only have the documents and music mirrored, since its not that big a deal to have to re-rip some movies if a drive dies in my opinion, so I'm not 'wasting' as much storage.  Another benefit to WHS that I really love is the ability to run Webguide and uTorrent off of it, so that they don't waste resources on the MCE box.

I reloaded my file sever (AMD 4200 AM2, 4Gb DDR800, 3TB) with WMS RC to Give it a test drive. So far I can only give it a thumbs up as a file server and backup solution. When it comes to integrating into the Media Center realm Microsoft totally blew it.  Maybe I'm wrong but so far I've found no signs of any type of media center features in the OS. If microsoft would have added even some kind of back-end media center functions like adding tuner cards that could be used by other media centers or provide a central location for Recorded TV, Videos, Pics, Music, that worked with all media centers on the network this would have been a home run for me. I'm sure we'll figure out how to tweak the OS to work for the Media Center guys and I already have a few ideas on how to try to make this OS play with Media Center, but the bottom line is Microsoft should have thought about this and done this for us...

You are correct that any sort of Media Center integration is not included in this release.

Chris,
Ya know, I'm really trying to come up with a reason to install WHS...honestly, I don't see one.  It offers absolutely nothing I am looking for and from what I've seen a read, it's a glorified NAS....but, what do I know!