You're right, if you don't have an HDTV, and there isn't one in the foreseeable future, then no BD isn't important. I don't know if you've actually seen a BD or HDDVD if you don't think they are better than DVD(all you have to do is find a BD with SD res special features and flip from that to the reg movie, and it's like WOWZER). Anyways, if you DO have a HDTV and you like movies then it's a BIG selling point......... I love the blu-ray =)
Those SD res special features look like crap by comparison even on regular DVDs. They don't pay ANY attention to the quality of the encoding on the special features. Why should they, nobody cares about them.
Hell... compare a 'bad' DVD like Hellraiser III (one of the worst I've ever seen in terms of encoding) to a good DVD like LotR side by side and it will blow you away. The quality, skill, and effort put into the encoding is actually more relevant than the resolution in terms of Picture Quality.
Point is, comparing the BD movie with an SD special feature is about as fair as comparing a professionally mastered DVD to a cam-corder theatre rip stored as a VCD, and concluding that DVD is 'soooo' much better than VCD based on that. DVD is better than VCD... but its grossly unfair comparison. After all if you put the theatre rip onto a DVD it would still look like crap. And if a pro made the VCD using the DVD as a source using a hi quality encoder it may well be intidistinguishable from the DVD to most users.
And in fact, a very well mastered DVD looks just as good as a mediocre BD. And the number of BDs with mediocre encoding is shocking given that improved PQ is supposed to be the whole point.
