Hey Rob,
SACD and DVD-A are a complete failure. They may still be turning out titles, but they are at a rate that is 1/10 of what it used to be. DSD(the bitstream of SACD) is not even in the spec's for BluRay.

When DVD players first came out, they were over a $1000. My toshiba costs about $1100. The price rapidly came down over the years as DVD became widely except by everyone.

The new HD format have bigger issues. There was no competition to the DVD, but there will be between these two formats. As long as they both go at it, prices will remain very high for both players. Sony may have a price advantage if they include BluRay in PS3. However it is VERY likely that HD-DVD will end up in the next version of Xbox

The copy protection schemes, and lack of HD output on the component video input has completely freaked out early adopters. Talk of having to hook your player to a phone line or internet to "confirm authenticity" of the disc, and having the ability to defeat your players ability to play a disc is a MAJOR turn off, at least for me.

On a technical basis I think Sony has beat out Toshiba. But they have done this before with beta. However the studio are really turned on with the potential capacity of BluRay at 200G for a four layer disc, that is something that HD-DVD cannot touch. Toshiba is already talking about compressing video more to increase capacity, Sony has no such issues.

I have heard both new audio formats, but I question the need for either except as backward compatibility with regular DVD. With the space available you can put 8 channels of PCM tracks on each movie and skip DD and Dts altogether. Don't get me wrong, both of the lossless formats sound terrific, but if they are loseless, then why not just use the PCM encoding instead? I know alot of people that will be sitting on the fence for a while to see were this dogfight goes before investing a dime into either format.