For those who are thinking of buying a HD ready set in the near future, this might be of interest.
Most of the current HD Ready LCDs/Plasmas have a native resolution of 768 lines (vertical), meaning that they will be able to display (or at least should) 720p transmissions natively (720 lines, progressive scan so 50 frames per second). They will have to downsample 1080i (1080 lines, interlaced at 50 fields/25 frames per second, as normal SD TVs). From my experience with HD, quite a lot will be shot in 1080i, certainly the BBC filmed stuff I have worked with has all been this. Don't worry about the hype on 1080p, as yet there are no cameras or any equipment which can deal with the 3GBps data rate (uncompressed).
At present HD CRTs are very thin on the ground, even in the professional market, and will (sadly) be phased out eventually due to environmental issues in their manufacture. In the HD studio I work in we have HD LCDs, however they are not really a patch on the 17" HD CRTs we have.
Stuff to look out for over the next few years will be
SED by Toshiba, should be able to do true black and nice range.
MT