NoDice said:
can the xbox 360 be a home entertainment system?any special things you can do with the hard drive? can you link the xbox HD to a PC?
can you rip dvd movies, and CD music onto it and have it playback w/o putting the cd/dvd’s back in?
what are some of the non-gaming more practical fetchers of each system?
Yes the Xbox 360 can be used as a home entertainment system. I don’t know about the other things you asked about. 
I know that the Xbox 360 now allows you to attach your netflix account to it and enables you to download movies from netflix straight to your Xbox.