Well if we're gonna talk s/w, i'll give you my take on the immense power of a truly distributed computing platform. As you're technical, you'll appreciate this.
Distributed is inherently better as:
1) there are those of us who don't want all the equipment in one place because our houses are horridly laid out and must have been designed by Satan's Architect who had an awful sense of humor not that i'm bitter or anything.
I have 2 primary locations where stuff is run (media stuff is one place, home automation another). It would have been mind bogglingly complex and space consuming to put it all in the main floor where the media closet is, but I didn't want my media wires running to the basement where the HA stuff is cuz it's a PITA to get to. Using two primary servers allows a customized design.
2) Load balancing, no need to "put all your eggs in one basket" to start off with, and ease of re-architecture as your system matures. I started off with 3 primary servers (SageTV, HA, and CCTV/db/HA#2). My system is mature & stable enough that I dropped to 2 (SageTV/most HA/db, and CCTV/someHA).
I'm slowly dropping to 1 mega-server and 1 Intel Little-Valley type situation so that there's only 1 full power ATX machine and 1 20watt mini-PC driving it all. I'lll still want 2 so I don't have every damn thing running on a single box, but there's no way I can easily do that migration if I didn't have a truly distibuted computing but network-integrated platform that didn't rely on fileshares or other such hacks.
But, I still think you should forget all this sw nonsense, and go do all that wiring first. The HA applications world will change 18 times before you're done, check out the state-of-the-state then.