If you haven't noticed by now, the GeForce GT 220 is not meant for gaming. While it may be able to play older games at lower resolutions like 1024x768 or with lower details, it completely lacks the rendering power for anything more serious. What it is made for is desktop use. The power consumption in idle is an amazing 10W which will help save you some money, especially if you are running a whole office full of computers. Feature wise everything you need is there, the lack of DirectX 11 doesn't seem to be that important considering you won't be enjoying many games on these cards and as NVIDIA told us for years, DirectX 10.1 is useless anyway. I really like the switch away from S-Video output to native HDMI on recent cards. It will help with the widespread adoption of media PCs to play back content on HD TVs. While it is nice that you no longer need to route an SPDIF cable to your sound card I would have preferred a more complete approach like ATI's integrated HD Audio Device inside the GPU.
When compared to the one-year old Radeon HD 4670, which sits at an even lower price point, the HD 4670 wins in Performance, Price, Perf/Watt, Perf/Dollar. Out of these criteria for a low-end card the most important is price. Just price, not price/performance - 3D performance doesn't matter for 2D/Aero desktop. Right now the GT 220 cards are going for $70-$80, which is clearly too high. Thanks to the 40 nm process NVIDIA can make those GPUs really, really cheap. This, in my opinion, is the whole point of this product: cheaper GPUs for NVIDIA, better margins. In order to be able to compete in the retail market, the price of these cards has to go down to the $50 region.
I am not that happy with Zotac's implementation of the GeForce GT 220, for some reason (probably cost) they chose the low memory clock speed of 790 MHz and used 1 GB of GDDR3. While 1 GB GDDR3 might read nice it has absolutely no performance impact on this kind of product, there is a difference at 2560x1600, but you are not going to game on a $1000 display with a $80 card. Another point is the fan noise, even though it is quiet there is still a lot of room for optimization here. Zotac used such a nice heatsink but then didn't optimize the fan settings for it. A nice treat is the included 3DMark Vantage license, even if you don't use it, you can sell it for a few bucks, which can help reduce the price of the card a bit.