First, charlie
That's the idea, that the house has a main server/computer room with its storage there but shared via network (ethernet or wireless 802.11g or better)to other rooms. So a case like this:





would easily fit in your rack. It's standard width and then all you have to do is connect it to your home network and access all your stored media from the server. Now I'm not that sure about 'media hubs'. They all seem to require a PC somewhere in the connection process, so your still getting a PC.

Now gonk,
Don't be so sure. Do you know how many companies are offering Media Center PCs? All the big boys are doing it, and you can get a Terabyte of storage for around $600 and the prices will easily be dropping by year end. Sony released a home server with 1 TB of storage in October 2004. (source) As well, most motherboards have SATA I or II in them for easily making a RAID array yourself of a Terabyte or more.

1,000 Gigabytes or storage, should easily handle most of today's needs. Sure, Blu-ray and HD-DVD will start pushing that at a max of 120 GB for HD-DVD with eight layers, and Blu-ray being 10GB more per layer, maxing at 200 GB. But the industry, though they have it already working, are not going to release four layer until 2007 and eight layer by mid 2008 or 2009.

Now, they may start releasing their higher formats earlier with HVD coming fairly soon with 3.9 TB storage capability. But anyway, movies do not need that much storage at 1080p resolution. True, HDMI cables currently won't handle the bandwidth frequency needed for 1080p with audio signal, but DVI-D can take care of the video needs of 1080p, and that's a standard out of current video cards for any PC.

Now something to note though, is that these PCs can do multiple displays, so Outlaw may want to incorporate more than one DVI video out connection, for those who would want to have their movie/TV on one screen (the big one) and their desktop on another. But as well, the user can just use the existing DVI out to go to their desktop monitor. So it's not a necessity.

Still, sure I like playing graphic intensive games at 1600x1200 (4:3) or 2100x1600 (16:9), but 1080p res, 1920x1080, is not that far away from it, so I'd like to see a computer game on my 80" front projection screen or even just surf the web that way. And, I'm guessing many others out there don't have that many different desires than me.