I can tell you that if you do have an xbox, there is no reason in the world to leave it at stock. I love being able to FTP into my xbox, make backups of my hard disk, and so on.

The Xbox media center is a must have, as is being able to run linux on my Xbox. In fact, I was surfing techzonez on firefox in XDSL (extra damn small linux)... that was some experience. It was hard to navigate with the xbox controller... but they make a USB adapter that you can plug a mouse and keyboard into. Awesome!