Xbox 360 Fanboy points out this article comparing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a modded Xbox running XBMC vs. a shiny new Xbox 360.
While I don't argue with the conclusion in terms of media formats, they severely downplay the role of an 360 if you do have a Windows Media Center Edition machine.
To the best of my knowledge, the closest an XBMC machine can come to watching recorded TV is a hacked-up system of auto-downloading TV bittorrents from RSS to a samba drive, and watching them from there. It'll work in a pinch, but it's not exactly user-friendly. However, if you need to do anything but stream TV from an MCE machine, XBMC is the way to go.
It's much more polished than any other open source media app I've seen, it just lacks the hardware and software to do TV viewing. Perhaps someone will hack a MythTV frontend on the thing and complete the picture, but until then, anyone that wants to have the best of both worlds will end up using one of each. It's really quite a shame, as Microsoft could have completely obfuscated these original Xbox hacks if they hadn't been so shortsighted with the 360's media format support.
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