You can get some uber cheap Blu-Ray setups now, but personally i would consider the idea of both BR and HDDVD together. The price of BR discs is pretty silly, especially for a single movie, where as a lot of people are panic selling their HDDVDs cheap on ebay and last time i looked you could get most hddvds for around £10 online. As youve already found out, any format will get replaced sooner or later anyway, so depends if u want upto date media or just rewatchable movies.
Id still love a 1080p plasma, but any 1080p lcd is pretty much fine, like with any tv check out the picture in store and look at random features and inputs available.
Personally im not that fussed about the HD stuff, even having watched 1080p stuff on a big lcd, its nice but not shockingly so. They should have gone higher tbh
