"It's too slow to do movie editing, or graphic art stuff."
Not true - a G4 tower with similar specs was considered top of the line before the G5 shipped, and plenty of pros did high end work on them. A Mini will run the entire Adobe CS suite just fine (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat), and I run all that at work, and more, working on large (300 megs) files on a 400 mhz G4 Tower.
Drop a gig of ram in the Mini, it'll run Photoshop and the Macromedia web stuff like a champ.
A lot of office managers and art directors I know are looking at the Mini in a big way for production machines in prepress and design shops. No, the Mini will not be a good Maya machine, but very few consumer computers are - it'll run Maya, but if you want to work relatively painlessly, you need a pro machine, a G5 or Pentium 4 with all the bells and whistles. (It will run Strata3D fine, and my fave, Sketch-up)
As for games, it should run everything acceptably, except for the high-end ones, like Doom3, which you need a $3000 machine to run, even on the Windows side. I've been reading people are playing games like World Of Warcraft and Sim City4 with no issues.
The way I see it, look at it like a low-end Powerbook - if it'll run there, a Mini will run it.
Of course, it's pretty slow compared to the dual 2 gig G5 I'm typing this on at home. :)
"When you add all this up; I think Apple has a Grand-Slam coming up."
That's where my money is - with Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) being the next piece of the puzzle.
Just one note: Doom 3 doesn't require a $3000 machine to run properly. Sure, it'll take every bit of power you can throw at it and crave more, but its minimum specs are actually playable. In most cases, the few people who needed to upgrade merely needed more RAM.
But, *IF* it runs like the G4 tower, as you have indicated; then Apple has slit it's own throat. Why would anyone buy a $499 Mac (ie. ~3-6% margins) instead of a $2,000 Mac (with 15-30% margins)? So, in laymans numbers, Apple will have to sell 20 Mini-Macs (~$15 profit) for each $2,000 Mac (~$300 profit). When you consider the 20x ramp in labor costs, due to production, coupled with reduced sales of the more expensive Macs; I foresee a catestrophy coming.
Jobs is no fool. That is my primary reasoning for questioning the performance statements you have made. Because, if the performance is as you state, Apple has just committed suicide.
My belief is that the Mini-Mac will be the HDTV answer to rental movies; that the iPod was to iTunes.