Hawaiian Pirate, I know what you mean. Its bad enough now and I just placed the order. I'll really be hating life when its a week or two out.
Firemonkey, I feel your pain about over engineering. I have Gig throughout the house as well as a 54g Wireless Network. I'm about to upgrade the Wireless to N and setup a mesh with several AP's. The Mesh will run on the 802.11a backbone and the clients will run on the 802.11g (all at N speeds). Not because I need to, just because I can .
As far as the Stoker goes, I'm thinking of getting it in case I need to leave the house for any reason during a smoke. If a server or network component goes belly up, I need to head into the office asap.
The 2 reasons I'm leaning towards the Stoker is
1 - The Web Interface. I see it as a great tool if I'm not at the house to monitor a cook, I can check in on it from wherever, even on my phone. Windows Mobile is a beautiful thing.
2 - My friend at work (The one wearing the cast in my Avatar) has one and has had great results on his BGE with it.
I also know what you mean by "Sparsely Populated between us", we visit Mickey twice a year and the drive up the Turnpike gives BFE a new meaning !!!