Reading NTFS shouldn't be a problem for most distributions, read support has been available for years. NTFS write support has been a bit patchy in the past but
NTFS-3G and
ntfsmount should allow decent read/write access. Both drivers should be available in most recent distributions.
You'll probably find it viable to run as a desktop as quite a few great apps run on multiple platforms these days (Firefox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice.org, etc). The only problem for me has always been the games, Wine is a good effort but it can't reliably keep up with every possible game.