Has anyone been able to define some clear hardware specs as to what is needed for ethereum? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
If you kind of read between the lines, it's going to be a coin (i think) dominated by botnets and the AWS mills. It seems to be a CPU + Lots of Memory thing. If you read through their forums (and reddits) they seem to have shifted from a position that GPUs could mine it (with maybe slight advantage) to not supporting it and encouraging CPU usage.
When they've been asked about that, they just seem to point towards the IPO distribution chart (and don't really dispute that botnets will likely rule Eth), which if you read between the lines says to me that if you're a small-time miner, buy the coins! Shame, in my opinion.