[Fire TV Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] skeptic_always:
Agreed, and valid point. Although I'd say Fire TV is pretty good, borderline great, not just okay.

Because most of your (valid) complaints don't apply to the average user. Side-loaded apps, switching between active apps, external keyboards.. This isn't Amazon's target audience. The designed use is for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, other similar services, and the occasional casual gaming. For it's $99 price tag, the FireTV does this very well and even comes with ethernet and an optical spdif connector. For the price of a Fire TV stick, nothing else really compares (don't say Roku stick, I have one of those and it blows by comparison). For "what would I recommend to my parents or non-techie friends" it comes down to one question: Do you need optical audio out? If yes, buy the FireTV, if no then buy a FireTV stick. Once I have some experience with Android TV that may change.

Now you're talking. I plan to buy one of these for my kids (or myself) as well, although a slightly different use. I'm not trying to replace their laptops or a desktop, but instead I'm looking to replace traditional game consoles. At a claimed double the power of an Xbox 360, and nvidia optimized games in the $20 and under price range, this could be a winner. Not to mention, it also replaces a streaming device, and as you stated above with MS Office/Google Docs and a browser it could possibly replace a traditional computer (although my boys play some PC games that currently don't have a console game equivalent). The Grid gaming and PC streaming doesn't appeal to me, but if it helps with the popularity of this device then great. I just don't want my Internet slammed every time my kids want to play games, plus pay a monthly fee, etc. I don't have, nor do I plan to ever again own, a gaming PC so the PC streaming isn't going to work for me anyway.

Here we disagree. Even if you could buy a generic Android box that was 1,000,000 times faster it wouldn't blow away the Fire TV IMHO. The reason, Fire TV is snappy and quite good at standard streaming services and XBMC. I do pretty much everything from the recent tab, or occasionally the game tab. I don't even notice the Movie/TV tabs (Amazon specific content). It would be nice if you could customize the UI, change where and how things are displayed, but on the other hand the native apps are setup for a simple remote. Perhaps things have changed since I last used a generic Android box, but using apps like netflix that are designed for touch screen pretty much suck with a remote. I refuse to use a keyboard or mouse for typical TV streaming, and this is where my generic Android device fell on it's face. Some apps were klunky with just a simple remote, others required some kind of mouse. The fastest hardware and best OS UI can't make up for an app with sucky simple remote control support.

This will all change when the generic Android boxes start shipping with Google Android TV OS (terrible/confusing naming choice) and use the leanback UI. For now though I wouldn't recommend any generic Android box to anyone no matter how good the hardware is or how great they did customizing the UI. Ultimately it's all about the apps.