so like others have said before me, you are essentially getting a free Apple TV, or at least the interface. Front Row has been adapted from the Intel and G5 Macs to work on all supported Leopard machines, so you no longer need a remote for it. My G4 has Front Row on it now, and I just use the arrow keys to navigate.

About the music not playing issue, I just tested it and I don't think it's a bug. If you leave the Music area of Front Row, it will cease to play since you may start visiting another category where it may only play movies, not music. Doesn't make a lot of sense why Apple changed this, but remember in Tiger, Front Row was heavily dependent upon iTunes and iPhoto. Now, it still is, but it doesn't have to open iTunes to play music or videos like it has in the past. Now Front Row is more of an app than it was before, since beforehand, it was like a window channeling your media through itself even though iTunes was the real app doing the work. It's not a "just for show window" anymore. But that's how I see it.

Front Row has never crashed my system, in Tiger or Leopard. My guess is that for your "missing" podcasts, they may not be in your iTunes Library or they are in a place where Front Row has not looked. Check out the locations of the files Front Row can't find and see it moving them into another place helps. And if you want to be able to play music through iTunes without searching through all of your songs, I recommend the iTunes player widget (it's standard, so you don't need to download it) for the Dashboard. Not the same, but it's something to work with if you're bent on using a similar thing.

Hope my essay helped you out some. Let us know what happens.
-BMF