Exactly so. If you want a true idea of what they look like, find a high-end specialty store in your area for your window-shopping, not Sears or Circuit City, and tell them you want to see a 1080i broadcast.
I don't know how hyper-critical you are, but I was visiting a friend of mine a while back ("Mr. Early Adopter", we call him), and he has an HDTV monitor, with the HBO HDTV feed from DirecTV. And watching an episode of "Band of Brothers" in 1080i and Dolby 5.1 was just amazing. Maybe better than film. No, definitely even better than film in a theater. Really.
Your posts promted me to go back to Circuit City this afternoon. I grabbed a salesman and he sat me down next to two projection TVs - one of which he swore was a satellite HDTV signal, the the TV next to it a non-HDTV set. They were both carrying the same basketball game.
The HDTV picture was more crisp and well defined. On a projection screen you could really see the difference. The reason I have shied away from projection TVs in the past was the IMHO crappy picture as opposed to the consistently sharper tube TV picture.
HDTV has cured that problem.
We are redoing the family room next year are looking to put in an HDTV. Hopefully the prices will continue to fall and more DIRECTV stations will ramp up to HDTV in about ten months or so.
Plus, with picture in picture, it will be a neat 45 inch computer monitor (I'm serious) :>)