The board is designed so that all the peripherals are likely to just be lying around - a spare SD card, a cell phone charger, an old TV if you don't have a monitor handy, etc.
My old monitor doesn't have HDMI input. Reading text through the composite out on a old TV is painful. They should have used a gpu with DVI-I output, so that it would have digital and analog (VGA) output pins, in my opinion. Nevertheless I'm waiting for mine to arrive :)
I have one of those, but the Rpi HDMI doesn't have analog pins, afaik, which precludes its use with older LCD monitors with only a VGA (analog) input, which was what I meant initially, sorry if I didn't make myself clear.
HDMI is compatible with DVI. You can convert from DVI to HDMI and vice versa (without requiring logic, simply hooking the right lines into the right port).
