Gather 'round, let's watch movie trailers
The Apple TV is a purely passive machine; you can view all the content you want on it, but you cannot under any circumstances acquire new content. Sure you can sync to other computers, but you cannot purchase new content from the iTunes Store from the comfort of your couch. While this is great for preventing impulse buys, it also weakens the experience.
In the early days, the point of a digital media extender was to simply get content off of your PC and access it in some other room. These days, the requirements are far greater. We don't just want a device that can stream (or in this case, copy) data from your computer, we want a device that can extend some of the functionality of your PC as well.
The Apple TV does a great job giving you access to all of the movie trailers available on its website, but where's the integration with Rotten Tomatoes or Google Movie Listings? Apple TV lets you gather all of your friends around and get excited about an upcoming movie, but then you still have to go back to your Mac or PC to do the obvious next step in your quest for entertainment. We're not asking for a full fledged web browser as that's counterproductive, but what we are asking is for something a little more capable than what we've been given.
The analogy extends far beyond just watching movie trailers; if the Apple TV is designed for the user who has a lot of content purchased from the iTunes Store, it sure does a terrible job of encouraging its users to purchase from the store. The Apple TV interface allows you to get previews of the top 10 movies, music, and TV shows currently available on the iTunes Store but if you decide you want any of them you have to head back to your computer to actually buy them.
We understand that it's far easier from a security standpoint to only allow a transaction at one point on the network, but we can't help but list the inability to purchase content on the Apple TV as a flaw.
For what it's worth, the actual inclusion of the top 10 most popular content on the iTunes Store is a nice addition. It does give you a great way to preview things you may like, even if it requires a trip back to the desk to purchase/pirate it.
Easy access to movie trailers is something Apple has always done well and the Apple TV handles it no differently. It's far easier getting access to the latest movie trailers on the Apple TV than on the Xbox 360 for example; the very fast and simple interface is mostly to thank for that. Content streams incredibly fast from Apple's servers to the Apple TV, so quickly in fact that we believe the actual trailers are 480p and simply upscaled if you have a higher resolution display.
Despite having a quicker interface than the Xbox 360, Microsoft did do one thing better than Apple with regards to getting access to previews of content. On the Apple TV, you have no way of knowing what's new. You can get a list of all of the movie trailers you can download, but there's currently no support for showing you what's been added since the last time you checked. It's probably a trivial thing to add later on through an update, but it's the type of functionality that you'd honestly expect out of the box.
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