Is Google TV really that good?

I purchased the "Sony Internet TV Blu-ray Disc Player" last week, and after extensive usage these are my findings:

Video streaming on Google TV seems to be a bit slow, especially when streaming at 1080p. When trying to watch a movie on Crackle (via the "Sony Recommends" menu on GTV), it would pause every 3 seconds to buffer. I brought this issue up to Google two days ago and still haven't received a response back regarding this issue. Streaming 1080p video content on my computer poses no issues at all; however this may be due to the fact the Google TV uses a measly 1.2GHz Atom core processor and my computer houses a 2.93GHz Intel Core i7 processor.

Another issue I have with the device is the marriage Google seems to have wish Dish Network. Dish DVRs will integrate, allowing you to schedule recordings directly from within GTV. DVRs from other providers will act as a separate device, you won't be able to search for, and schedule recordings directly from the GTV like you can with Dish Network.

I must also wonder, why Napster -something almost no one uses anymore- is a built-in app on GTV, but Facebook isn't? It would have been nice to have a 10-foot user interface for Facebook. There is one for Twitter and Pandora, so it doesn't make sense that Google wouldn't include one for Facebook too.

You can easily use Netflix and Amazon VOD with Google TV, but if all you want to do is stream free content from sites like hulu.com, abc.com, etc. you'll be out of luck. Even changing the browser's user-agent string doesn't seem to help. Early reports have suggested changing the UA to "Generic" to watch Hulu content, but Hulu has since fixed it so even a customized UA is blocked from their site when using a Google TV.

There is a positive to all this negative, and that is the ability to play your own content via a USB hard drive formatted as FAT. I had no issue at all with loading a bunch of music and movies onto an external hard drive and playing it on the Google TV via it's Media Player app.

Considering I bought this device mainly as a Blu-ray Player and thought of the Google TV aspect as a "bonus," I'm not too disappointed with the shortcomings of GTV. However, for those that just want a Google TV to stream internet videos on their TV, you may be better off with just connecting a small computer with an HDMI port (such as a nettop or Mac mini). You can get a low-end nettop for around $200, which is less expensive than a Google TV device.