Okay, it doesn't have a NIC out of the box, but he doesn't seem to be adverse to hacking.. Adding a NIC to a Series 2 consists of buying a USB dongle, plugging it in, and telling the TiVo to use it (make your dialing prefix ",#401"). I'd hardly even call that hacking, your grandmother could do it. Adding one to a Series 1 requires opening the case and plugging a special NIC on to the edge connector on the board.

TiVo is a lot more Empeg-like.. with a bit of tweaking to get a shell* you can add all kinds of third party software, or write your own. Replay apparently has some sort of web interface, but TiVo's is open source, tweakable, plugins, etc. You can do TiVo -> Computer archiving and then restore it back to another TiVo (or the same one obviously), instant show sharing and saving old Simpsons eps for as long as you can afford the HDs for.

*: Okay, you can't do on Series2s, yet.. there's firmware/boot loader protection that hasn't quite been hacked.