I will vouch for the heat. It definitely is a hot little device.
After the data transfer, it was *very* hot. Hot enough that it was immediately uncomfortable to touch. Hot to the level that if my amp were that hot I'd shut it down. After sitting unused overnight I expected it to be cool again, but was surprised to find that it was still quite warm.
As an IT guy, I'm well-aware of the dangers of overheated computer equipment. It does not appear to have any sort of fan (none that I could hear, anyway), and so I think it is just passively cooled. Though there are no vents on the top of it, so it's hard to say how effective it is. Apple is usually pretty good at designing stuff, so I hope they did their homework on this. I'm not overly worried about it dying due to heat, but I will definitely follow its instructions to *not* place anything on top of it.
I have a live ethernet cable already run to my AV Rack for my DishDVR receiver (was for Tivo, ages ago). As a test, I was thinking of throwing a cheap switch on the end of it and hooking up the AppleTV to that, so that I could disable its WiFi. Just to see if that would cool it down a bit. After all, that heat is coming from the power it's drawing from the wall, and awfully wasteful...
