It has been a few days and overall I’m pleased with the ease of upgrading my systems. The new 64 bit core really improves performance – particularly on my mac mini DVR (using elgato’s eyeTV software).
I have also resolved my Time Machine issue – although not as cleanly as I would like.
Time Machine will backup to afp shares on other OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) machines. However, it will not allow you to put a backup on a afp share that is being hosted on a linux machine (via netatalk). This is disappointing as I had to go out a purchase a 1TB usb drive to attach to a mac mini. While this was not cheap it was less expensive than the alternative – buying a external drive for every Mac in the house.