To me there doesn't seem to be much wrong with the Q hardware, apart maybe for the price. I like the design, it looks to be well put together and I don't need audiophile quality amplification.

I know you have some sort of religious objection to the built in amp, but I'd happily take a couple of Qs is they were running Squeezebox software (though of course if they were they'd need a small fraction of the computing power that they've stuffed into the Q).

The Qs software in comparison is quite clearly a disaster and quite bizarrely useless.