At the moment I have a PC wired up to my TV for watching video, but I'm shortly going to move and that's going to become tricky. Are current tablets powerful enough to play back 1080p content, and is it easy to wire one to a TV?
You would need a lot of memory in the tablet to hold a small number of 1080p videos and the formats supported might be limited. You could you a media player such as WD TV Live. This will stream video as well as play them from a USB stick or drive.