Wow, this move smells of desperation... lol
It kind of does though. In any case, it is an excellent offer.

The feedback from early adopters of both formats has been overwhelmingly negative, hopefully Warner took notice and will put this atrocity to rest.

Bill, don't confuse Plextor with the cheap Chinese manufacturers. It is a Belgian company that produces high quality drives for PCs that are generally much more expensive than their competition. I agree with the rest of your post though.

Well, they 're all PCs more or less. DVD players, HD-DVD players & BD-players have PC components and run some type of closed OS. Their discs just store data, they don't contain the movie engraved as VHS cassettes did. Then it's all up to the player, its processing power, its software etc. That's why the same movie can look very different subject to the quality of the player. And its also why some players can play video encoded in different codecs, say Xvid or WMV, AVC etc.
So they really are PCs with a very limited scope. Plus, they look nice in order not to disturb your living room aesthetics and they run silent in order not to ruin your viewing experience (hear that Xbox 360 + add-on? :p) Toshiba's first HD-DVD player was just a bit too obvious about this fact. Welcome to the digital age.

Those of you that were annoyed a) have no sense of humor
b) would make perfect "victim" material for this type of prank.

I meant "mpeg-2 codec that is used on DVDs", sorry for that. Engadget really needs to add an "edit" option for us lousy typers.

@ Farshad
Mpeg-4 (AVC) does not take more space than Mpeg-2, it needs much less for comparable quality. Like Microsoft's VC-1 it is a newer and much more efficient codec than the decade-old mpeg-2 that was is on DVDs. Sony and others on the Blu-ray camp claim that the newer codecs cannot match the quality of Mpeg-2, which is why we need the extra capacity of Blu-Ray.
Now while there have been some truly amazing mpeg-2 transfers recently on Dual Layer BDs, the quality is not really better than what VC-1 or AVC has to offer. So mpeg-2 is probably on its way out, and I expect the Blu-ray exclusive studios to move fully to AVC within 2007.
The BD's extra capacity can find much better use than wasting it on mpeg-2. Uncompressed LPCM sound is just amazing (and probably out of the question for HD-DVD), some more extras would be nice too.

HD-DVD backers have estimated over 300 titles for 2007, while Blu-Ray backers have estimated over 600. Which makes sense since Blu-Ray has support from all major studios except Universal.

No, it should look fantastic. Of course you need to sit at the proper distance (say 5 meters), but it makes sense as no one in their right mind would want to sit close to such a big screen. Projectors usually go as high as 120'' and look great. Heck, there are even 720p projectors that look amazing.
Resolution is not as big a factor as most people think.

Well, no surprises here. Panny has had a neatly separated line of TVs for some time now: LCD-TVs up to 32'' and plasma for anything above that.
If profit margins on small LCD-TVs are plummeting it makes sense to concentrate on the more lucrative (and IMHO far superior in terms of PQ) plasmas.
Pioneer has also been trying to establish plasma as the best display technology for which you have to pay a premium over LCD.