The Time Capsule unit is intriguing. I wonder just how functional that wireless hard drive is and how fast the data rates can be. What's cool is to imagine having one hard drive networked to many machines. It would be cool to get my hands on one a play around with it.

Now that I think of it, I wonder if it can actually function as a regular hard drive or if the unit only functions as a Time Machine drive... hmm.

I'd love to have one -- don't want to spend the $$

I believe Time Capsule works seemlessly with Time Machine, allowing those with laptops a way to back up their files (as well as other wireless, Leopard using Macs), and it also can be partitioned to work as a shared drive with both Windows and Mac machines. One side note I learned the hard way...I purchased an Airport Extreme prior to the Time Capsule thinking I would use my own drive in the future to run Time Machine (buy the capacity or speed I wanted in a drive) and it turns out that currently, Time Machine only works with Time Capsule if you want to use the wireless backup option. You can still share a drive plugged into Extreme, just not with Time Machine.

The Time Capsule can function as a Time Machine companion... but it can also be used as regular NAS with OS X, Windows and Linux. You can partition it if you want to. As of 2 days ago via the Airport Extreme and Time Machine updates for Leopard, you can now use regular Airdisks for Time Machine backups. The Time Capsule just makes the process smoother. As to data transfer rates don't expect much even over a direct 802.11n connection. If you have anything but n devices connected it will default to the speed of the slower devices and thereby cripple your transfer rates even further. It has been recommended that you make the initial Time Machine backup over Gigabit Ethernet. Updates to your backup can be done over 802.11n.

I'm actually going to get a 500GB one next month. Then buy a 1TB WD drive, swap that into the Capsule and put the 500 in my G4. I can do that for $20 more than buying a 1TB Capsule. I don't have Leopard yet so I'm going to be using it with CCC as NAS backup for my G4 and MacBook Pro.

I had a bad experience with a snow airport. It was extremely buggy and hardly worked. SO I ended up going with a linksys router which worked great. I suppose I could go back to an extreme.

Is there a 3rd party option similar to what apple is offering now?

I would love to buy one I really badly need one.....