From Mac mini to iMac?

Hello
I switched about 6 months ago when I bought a Mac mini, and I'm definitely loving the whole Mac-thing! However, the computer is kinda weak, I recently read that the video card on Mac mini stops working properly if the screen resolution exceeds 1280x960, or something. What I have noticed is that the Tiger animations such as Exposé and Dashboard stutter very annoyingly, user switching cube doesn't rotate very nicely at all, and iTunes visualizer seems to be too heavy for this computer. As silly as it may sound, but this has been a huge turn-off for me.
And the iLife apps seem to be a little heavy as well, I'm seeing the spinning beach ball very often, and GarageBand is giving me error messages about the hard drive being too slow...
How do these things work on a 20" iSight iMac with 1 gig of RAM? I can't really test this anywhere, unless I take a long trip to the nearest Apple Center. I guess a Power Mac would be best, but I find the iMac much more appealing aesthetically and price-wise, so I thought I'd ask here to be sure.
Thank you
Mac mini   Mac OS X (10.4.3)   1.42 GHz 1 GB RAM

Thanks for your replies!
As for the speed problems with Mac mini, I've repaired permissions, verified disk, I've used apps like YASU and Onyx, but these haven't really improved the performance much. I also have about 45 gigs of free space, so that's not a problem, I think? I would imagine I have these "problems" simply because of the 4200 RPM hard drive, and because of the rather crippled video card with very little VRAM.
I did a little test, and Exposé (with maximum of 4 windows) was ultrasmooth when the Dock was set to hide, and there were no icons on the desktop, go figure? And the other graphical stuff was really smooth when I reduced the resolution, but that is not really a solution with an LCD display.
Some XBench scores show that the 2.1 GHz iMac gets a score of 80-90 compared to my Mini which got 31, but I don't know how this "translates" in real world usage? There doesn't seem to be that much difference in CPU stuff, on few things my G4 appears to be slightly faster, but the bars on graphic tests and disk tests are most definitely longer compared to my system.
Please bear with me, I'm slightly ignorant on this stuff.

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