Does Color Really Matter?

The short answer is yes.
My M Roadster came with an after market head unit that is a brushed aluminum color. It sort of matched the chrome rings on the gauges (not really).

Here's the one that came with the car.

Here is the one I swapped into the car.

Originally BMW equipped this car with a black head unit, pretty sure it was AM / FM / Cassette. I've always thought it was very plain and did nothing to help the center console look good. After living with the brushed aluminum look for a few months I like black.
Maybe BMW got it right after all.

A little about the swapped in unit. It came from my '97 328 convertible. I replaced the original BMW unit with this one a few years ago. It took a lot of searching to find one like this, I don't know if there are any made like it anymore. What makes this unit so special to me is that it has a USB port and a 1/8 inch AUX input on the front.

I wanted the ability to plug anything into the head unit and have it play out of the car speakers without having wires run into the rear of the unit.

The USB port will take any USB hard drive (external hard drive, thumb drive, memory card adapter etc) and it will also take an iPod connection. I have a memory card adapter that is very small - it sticks out less than 1/4 inch - and it holds 8 gig of music. I leave it in all the time. I never need a CD player, but if I do there is one behind the face.

Car Show

Spent the morning at a local car show.
Almost 300 cars showed up. The Roadster was in the Foreign category along with about 15 other cars. I thought the coolest car in my category was the Honda NSX but I didn't vote for it, I almost voted for it.

Here's my car at the show.

Awards were by popular vote. Lots of my friends were at the car show and I asked them to vote for me. I thought I had a chance at least at third place. I should have seen it coming but Herbie beat me for first, second, and third. One of the Volkswagen Beetles was even done up with a "53" and painted like Herbie.
The only thing I got out of that car show was a really clean car.
I guess it's impossible to beat a car with that much publicity, he made 6 movies!

On another topic, I realized something at this show.
Look at these pictures of early 60s Corvette dashboards:

 '64 hardtop

'64 convertible

Now look at the M Roadster dashboard

There are strong similarities.
As I wandered around the show looking for other cars that bore some resemblance to this dashboard layout there were lots of cars with a "dual cockpit" type layout but nothing as clearly similar as the early 60s Corvettes.

I'm not saying the BMW designers had these Corvettes in mind when designing the Z3 interior (maybe they did, I don't know). At the end of the day there are only so many ways to lay out a dashboard. It's inevitable that some cars will look like others even if the designers were all kept in isolation.