"anything above will actually lead to lower picture quality...."

not bad, I doubt it for good cameras with mirror reflex etc. but I could imagine that this is true for many small-format cameras where the lense is the weak point. On the other hand my Sony T1000 with 8GP looks awesome. Bottomline is anyway if you want a good camera (or TV) one number won't say much the whole package has to work.

Let's see Pioneer is about Plasma. Resolution is the one area where LCD is kicking Plasma's butt. He says resolution isn't important, meaning he says LCD's biggest selling point is irrelevant. Has he ever hooked a computer up to a 720P monitor. I will take my 1920 x 1080 thank you very much. People always seem to forget that. The other think is 1080P is becoming standard. I bet by 2009 all tv sets 40" and up will be 1080P unless they are some junk model. He is just upset his company has decreased the price enough yet to stick it in all their tvs. That said I do think that some other quality aspects on a tv are best found on plasmas.

All other things the same higher resolution is better.

I've seen a fair deal of high end full HD tv's on many different settings, and I call bullcrap from miles off here...
If contrast, color, shades, response, sound and clarity is top, adding twice as many pixels DOES make an ocean of difference, trust me!

Mines 1080i. Seems fine to me.

Ha ha right.

One thing they do not get is the fact that you simply can get nearer to the display when the resolution is higher, which makes for theater feeling. The important factor is not absolute screen size after all but screen width at optimal distance for resolution.
While a good old CRT would burn out your eyes with his flicker when the distance was too short the new LCDs are as good as PC monitors and you can go nearer without problem. So yes dpi is the most important factor for TVs (as long as you can choose distance to screen)