As you’ve pointed out, if

[Aaron Ledger]

As you’ve pointed out, if content is marked Copy Once by the cable provider, there is unfortunately only the analog hole to exploit to get around that. You can have a system with WMC and Xbox extenders which can all work together for multi-room viewing, shared guide, etc., but that won’t get you content on your other devices. M-card solutions do work with other platforms besides WMC, but that is only true for Copy Freely content.

Slightly cheaper than the HD-PVR is the Colossus. If your content is all free of copy protection, you could investigate using something like Remote Potato to play it on the iPad and other devices.