Hi
I am contemplating several apps for iphone/ipod touch, and I assume I need a Mac for the SDK. I have not used an Apple since Apple ][, so I know zilch about OSX. Obviously Macs are expensive, the only reasonably priced piece of hardware is the Apple TV thingamajig, I wonder if it could be useful for my purposes - installing both OSX + IPhone SDK ? Please advise. Thanx.

not a good idea at all. 256 megs or ram a slow processor and lack of sse3 support without emulation, on top of the effort involved to even get leopard on the appletv, let alone a working dev environment (if its even possible) you might as well spend the extra dough on a mini.

Either buy a Mac Mini, which isn't that expensive at all, or transform your PC into a Hackintosh. If you have common/standard hardware it should be possible to get it all working.