One thing nice about the standalone TiVos is the media option. It allows you to stream music, pictures, and video from your PC via your home network to your TiVo. Also, the standalones allow you to remotely program something to record from the web.

Although there are other DVRs and HTPC's out there that can do a lot of what TiVo does....none of them can do the "Season Pass" functionality as well as TiVo.