No surprise here, thegreek and OGB are not entirely on the same page on this, I love Apple stuff, as well as Windows and Linux and anything with a processor inside (and I am running all three on my Macbook Pro right now
). No beef against Apple from me - stock has gone up 13x in the last 5 years so they are doing something right. I have an original Apple TV since it was introduced. It is a great device for playing audio or video files and for browsing podcasts. I have Boxee installed on mine and enjoy that user interface (a usb hack). The orignal AppleTV will not run Netflix on Boxee, BTW - the processor is too weak for that. For what you are describing it should work fine.
The ATV you are using needs to be on the same subnet as your laptop. If your laptop or iphone are borrowing the same internet connection then they are in the same subnet and should work fine (but you are going to eat up bandwidth on that subnet if you are streaming). The protocol used by Apple is proprietary - DMAP (Dig Media Access Prot), but other apps had reversed engineered it (Ex. Songbird) - until iTunes 7 came along and added a hash check that no one has figured out yet (but you can still install itunes 6 from oldapps.com, if you want to circumvent that).
I like the fact that I can walk with my laptop or ipad to my AppleTV connected to my setup and use the ATV as "speakers" for playing stuff on itunes.
AppleTV2 is a streaming device - no storage there - and not a fit for what you are looking for, IMO. Apple believes users were confused by ATV 1's functionality, so they dumbed it down to pure streaming, but made it easier to use. This made it less of a niche product, in theory.
Hope this helps.
Pepe