Topic: Why do LCD TVs cause pointer lag but not button-press lag? Answer: They don't

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Actually, the real problem isn't a low adoption of HD sets. The problem many of us are lamenting is that HD was adopted far too early across the board, long before the tech even came close to catching up to CRTs in a number of crucial areas. Yes, there are now many higher-end LCDs with good black levels, low lag, more acceptable upscaling, and smoother motion, but the fact remains that the vast majority of HD sets sitting in living rooms across the nation make standard-def content look far, far worse than it did on the CRTs that those sets replaced. I see this all the time when I go over to someone's house and play their Wii on their LCD set (most of these sets having been bought a couple years ago, or just a little more recently than that). People were wowed by the higher resolution in the stores, and the manufactures needed the next-big-thing to push sales again, but the tech wasn't ready yet in so many important ways if you really care about image quality beyond mere resolution.

On the particular bits you're talking about:
1. Lag - The lag is low on many models now, but you have to be extremely careful to research before buying an HD set, or you may have considerable lag. However, you are correct that this issue is fading into the past.

2. Upscaling - "Unless the TV does a bad job with anti-aliasing" - nearly all of them do. I'll never forget how horrible LoZ:4 Swords (GC) looked when I brought to a friend's apartment to play on his new HD set, which wasn't very different in size from my CRT at the time. Everything looked so pixellated it pretty much ruined the beautiful 2D graphics of the game.

"If you had a 90" 480i CRT, I guarantee it would not look better than a 90" 1080p LCD TV, even if the game is rendering in 480i resolution." I beg to differ, I see this all the time. The edges are smoother on the more natural look of a CRT (when running at standard-def resolutions). Everything looks jagged on many HD sets. Not all, because some have better upscaling, but it's a widespread problem nonetheless. Even with a large CRT, you won't see the oft-mentioned Wii "jaggies" at all, but with many of the large LCD sets, you'll barely be able to look past the jaggies long enough to get immersed in the game. Again, I've played GC and Wii on large CRTs, and it looks smooth.

3. Black levels - definitely improving on newer high-end models, but I walk through the local electronics stores regularly, and the majority of the more budget-priced LCD sets (that sell like hotcakes) have awful black levels that you can spot from across the room.

4. Motion - don't talk about those "enhanced" refresh rates, they're a god-awful invention. I first encountered those on Samsung sets that called it "Movie Plus," where it would essentially splice in extra frames, supposedly to smoothen out the film experience. In fact, it was really just a correction for the motion blurring inherent in those sets; since keeping each frame up for the usual time span caused a blurring effect in those pixels (a problem completely foreign to CRTs), they had to bump up the refresh rate. Since the film you're watching doesn't have those extra frames, the set would add them programmatically. What it resulted in was the absolute worst film experience possible, giving everything a sped-up feel that killed the natural motion of the film itself.

Now that feature (which, again, was only to correct an inherent flaw in LCDs) has been pushed farther and offered as a bonus. For sports or something of that nature, I might be able to see the purpose, but it still makes films look horrendous, by giving the motion an unnatural look and by speeding up the film so that it starts to look like it was shot on a different type of camera. You can't take a classic film which looks beautiful in its original 24 frames/sec and then just magically bump it up to a higher refresh without making it look ridiculous.

By the way, my primary TV is now a Panasonic plasma, and while I'm mostly satisfied with it, I have many complaints. There's no question that my old CRT was better at some things. Mario Galaxy looks great on the plasma, but RE4 looks a hundred times worse than it did on my nice CRT, no matter how much I tweak settings. Is it so much to ask for the newest generation of tech to wait until it has truly surpassed the last gen in all ways, rather than being a compromise where you get a couple flashy features but lose others?

Again, as you point out, you can buy LCD sets now that have solved pretty much all the problems, but they're more expensive, and the LCD market is still pushing sub-par tech into countless homes, making me cringe when I go over to houses of acquaintances and see how bad their viewing experience is.