From Windows user: Leopard

Question

Hi all.
I'm a typical Windows user, never had any Macs in my life. And my English is not perfect, sorry
Being impressed by new iMac and all that hype around Leopard and having constant pressure from my kids and wife, I bought a brand new iMac 20", wireless mouse/keyboard and AirPort station. Brought it all home, installed included Leopard and was very excited.
Now, three days later I'm sitting here, quite confused.
What I want from my Mac is simple: a hub/controller for all our photos, music, videos, movies, etc. And a safe computer for my wife to read mail and go online and my kids to get crazy with games and stuff.
The way I was going to set it up was this:
1. Replace my existing router with AirPort.
2. Set a certain space on one of my network drives for iTunes library, photos, etc. I was going to use RAIDed drive, so back up wasn't really needed, but I was thinking that Time Machine will cover all my future needs (if any) in terms of having all important things backed up safely.
3. Load all my media on that drive and share it with all machines in the house, Windows or Macs (this isn't going to be the only Mac in the family).
I bet you know already where I'm going with this. But first, Leopard bugs:
1. Dashboard quit working for admin users (me and my wife) on the first day. But it works just fine for my kids. Still can't fix it. My wife is especially frustrated about this because she was going to use some of those items quite a lot.
2. Eject button on keyboard and all eject buttons in Finder simply don't work. Period. The only way to eject a drive or image is to drag it to the Trash.
3. AirPort setup was a pure nightmare. I plugged it in, connected it to the modem and the yellow light started to blink. I waited for 10-20 minutes, just in case, because manual says it should be steady green right from the start. Then fired its Utility on Mac, it didn't see AirPort at all. I installed Utility on one of Windows machines with the same result. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite comfortable with networking and everything was set up correctly. The only way I was able to "see" this thing is by wiring a Win machine to it and using Windows networking tool.
4. After I finally managed it to work and all my machines were connected I plugged one of my USB drives into AirPort (just because I was curious). AirPort Utility couldn't see it, I mean it couldn't see the drive at all. I don't really need this but still can't fix it.
5. And, of course , the whole notion of "image mounting" drives me completely NUTS. I understand that this is a different world with its own rules and stuff, but still... If I have a bunch of files on one drive and I want to copy them to some other drive and I don't want to do this manually, why CCC and SuperDuper ask me to "mount" some kind of a "disk image" (which, as I understood, could be "sparse"/good or "not sparse"/bad) and write those files to it? What happened with plain and simple "copy these freaking files to this freaking location"? :)))
6. It turned out that Time Machine can work only with external drives. This is really strange. I know VERY FEW people who have only one computer. For those guys, having a separate FireWire or USB drive for each machine is a waste. The ONLY logical thing to do in this case is to have one drive/server on your network for all backups from all machines. Of course, this drive should be reliable (RAID or physical mirror). Also, having file versioning in Time Machine doesn't feel right. Modern drives are 200-300 Gigs. So, theoretically, if you have 200 gigs of files and all of them has been changed, you'd need at least 1 terabyte drive to store only 5 days' history. Not realistically, of course, but... They should explain it better, I think.
7. I noticed bunch of other smaller things in Leopard that bother me but, in general, we like our Mac and I think that Apple will fix most of bugs in the next update or so.
Now, a suggestion to Apple:
My family got 20 gigs of music, 4 gigs of photos and "unsizeable" amount of movies. If you really want our business then give us a possibility to load all of this on a NAS drive, share it with all machines on local subnet with parental control and control it from any machine that has been set as "admin" machine. Or something alone these lines. I'm really sick and tired of going to my Mac just to wake it up in order to continue listening iTunes on my Win machine while I'm working. And I can't set it to "never sleep".

Answer 1

Is this thing a full blown, non-scaled down Mac? Is the actual computer capable of everything that a regular, say, Macbook could do? Are there any disadvantages to it that hold it back from all the features?
Yes, on the inside it's a full computer, just in a smaller package. The hardware is quite similar to what was in the MacBook in its previous generation.
It's not deliberately "crippled" in any way.
Also, at the $600 STANDARD tech spec settings, can I run OS X smoothly and use all basic apps with maybe some light movie editing (iMovie/Final Cut)? Will it be really slow or what?
Sure can, and no, it won't be really slow. Encoding movies might take a few minutes longer. If anything slows you down doing basic tasks, it will be that the basic Mini comes with 1GB of RAM - you might feel that if you run multiple heavier applications at the same time.
What version of OS X does the Mac mini come with? Leopard?
Newly shipping ones will come with Leopard. Stores with old stock may sell you one that comes with Tiger or a Leopard upgrade disc.
Hows the transition from a long time Windows user to OS X?
Mostly smooth, and where there are differences, it's often surprising how much the OS X way "makes sense". Installing things takes a bit of getting used to, but once you work it out it'll become natural.