Bryston seems to be among the first to observe that high end PC sound cards have been able to pass bit perfect digital out at up to 24/192, this has been true for almost a decade now. I should mention that there are still a lot that will not pass 88.2 and 176.4. The card chosen for the BDP-1 is one of the better ones as are many Envy24 powered solutions. I believe it's an ESI Julia? Please clarify Mr Tanner.
Now for a rant. It seems like streaming devices are being treated as a new concept when they are more than a decade old and should be far more mature than they are. It seems as if all the energy was sucked away by Apple for iPod docking devices back in 2002 yet they still don't play decent file formats even now. Not long after, Turtle Beach discontinued the Audiotron. Prior to the iPod we were on the right track with centralized media storage and streaming devices that take the PC OUT of the living room, not put it there. I've been waiting since 2002 while quietly storing FLAC files on home brew headless servers. Bryston is the best example I have seen of a streamer. I'm also happy to say that someone finally found a good use for Apple handheld products by using them as a wifi remote control.
I actually do like Squeeze products, namely the Touch and Transporter but they are limited to 96khz clocking. At least the newest server software has a UPNP/DLNA plugin which works well. Tried a Reciva powered device, it won't do 24 bit and it reclocks everything to 48khz. Good thing for return policies.
Gapless playback is a virtue of FLAC and part of it being lossless. CD audio is gapless, true lossles copies would also retain the gaplessness. Pink Floyd, Erasure, Journey, ELP and so forth all need gapless playback. This is s tiny example, there are thousands of pop and rock offerings that need it. Gapless playback in Linux is purely dependent on which audio backend is used to decode the file.