Well, I never purchased an Airport Base Station (seemed a bit overpriced) but, I'm going to buy Time Capsule as soon as it's available. Looks like a smart marriage of tech and the one "Apple built" piece of Leopard that was missing before now.

I'm still running a wireless B network so, the extra speed will be a plus!

For you guys that purchased a Base Station please, take a deep breath.
From what I understand, even pre-Leopard, the AirPort Disk was quite buggy and NEVER fully worked. I would assume that in order to get Time Capsule to work Apple had to figure out what was wrong with the previous AirPort Disk software and make it stable. That's good news.

I'm sure there is a software update in the pipeline to give the Base Station the same functionality.

Wow they aren't gouging you. $130 over an Airport Extreme for basically the 500gb hard drive is pretty good.

But man why not combine this thing with the AppleTV? Then you're talking.

I think you already know the answer to that question.

One major point for MACWORLD to inquire about: how easy is it to service/replace the hard drive in this thing? If the hard drive goes bad and you want to buy a replacement drive to install in the "capsule", it has to be easy enough to take the old one out and install a new one...

I've got a non-gigabit Airport Extreme base station, and I can confirm that the Airport Disk was buggy - so much so that I stopped using it. It would corrupt hard drives horribly. I thought I had a failing drive, until I found that any drive I attached to the AP would corrupt. Disk Utility was able to fix the problems, but I got tired of having to disconnect the drive from the AP, connect it to a Mac, repair it, and reconnect to the AP. I was having to do that about twice a week, and I only had three Macs accessing it, usually not at the same time.

And, at least over the 100mb wired connection, the performance was abysmal. Terrible. I couldn't use it to host an iTunes library because it couldn't serve up the files fast enough. iTunes would hiccup, even when playing 128k AAC files.

I certainly hope the new product works better. It is priced well.

@Graphos: I think the "B and N" guy is confusing B with G...you can run an N network in "G compatibility mode" with a minimal performance hit. You will not get full N, but it is much faster (and a stronger signal) than G. My son's PC is connected through a G bridge with MIMO in WDS configuration, and the other N clients are still plenty speedy.

Pay $200-$400 extra for a wireless backup drive just to avoid connecting a USB cable.....No Thanks.

Though it is a good idea to make life easier for lazy bums or for people who don't have 5 minute a week to backup their stuff.

One question - if it is backup drive is it a good thing to have it connected to a computer and be running constantly?

Granted this is an okay update to the Extreme "N" router I got last year, I'm not in any sort of hurry to upgrade it, just to get the ability I was supposed to have in it to begin with. I have 2TB of storage just sitting here waiting to be able to be used with Time Machine, so hopefully as others have said, I too am one that anticipates an update to Time Machine that turns it back on for the rest of us, for free!!! I will not be happy to have to pay again for a feature I have already paid good money for and was told I was getting right up till after I made my purchases!!! Had I waited until this year to upgrade my Router, I wouldn't give this a second thought and jump on the 1TB version right away. This is the only product I seen as a worthy contender for the Apple Expo...