There's just nothing wrong with this little computer.
Except they start at $700.
If I were looking for a mini-PC that would also be suited for HTPC use I'd start with
Zotac's ZBOX platform. It's $250 for the motherboard, CPU, video, power supply (yeah, it's external), and case. You just add RAM (up to a 4 GB DDR2 SO-DIMM), and a hard disk.
It too has an SD slot. But no optical drive.
I was building machines with the motherboard out of this ZBOX, but in a case which had space for a laptop optical drive (was using Pioneer's slot loading one).
