The hardware offered for $499 looks competitive with a PC clone.
Not quite, damn near any PC in that price range comes with a monitor,keyboard and mouse.However if you already have such items and standard PC versions would plug in it might be worth looking into.Probably allot more reliable than any PC at that price.
I'm up to my kazoo with the 1.1 Ghz AMD running Fedora Core 3, XP2200+ running Windows 2000, 3.2 GHz P4 HT running Windows 2000, P4 1.7 GHz running QNX 6.3, PII-350 running QNX 6.2.1 off FLASH and Diamond Hercules EBX running QNX 6.3, Diamond Prometheus PC104 running QNX 6.2.1. That's just the X86 boxes attached to the KVM. The two Dell laptops aren't on the KVM. That is just the boxes in physical reach. Not to mention the Microchip PICDem2Plus and 2 CAN/LIN3 Demo boards used for CAN development and embedded PIC stuff.
All that stuff is to support my work. All personally purchased except for the PC104 and EBX single board computers. The Mini iMac would be mostly a novelty toy... for the limited number "free" time I have available.