The guys over at The Digital Bits have had a comparably lukewarm reception for Blu-ray. Like with HD-DVD, they feel that consumers are buying equipment that has not gone through the necessary testing.

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/mytwocentsa122.html

I'm also skeptical about Blu-ray and HD-DVD's chances, primarily because of how entrenched the DVD format has become and how recently most consumers switched over to that format (the DVD only passed VHS less than 4 years ago). Blu-ray/HD-DVD are not the big leap forward that the DVD was. The difference is that the DVD provided a tangible improvement in picture quality and functionality compared to VHS for every consumer. And aside from the picture resolution improvement, DVD also gave consumers multichannel audio, random search, interactive features, and computer connectivity. Everybody who bought a DVD player got an upgrade.

Contrastly, Blu-ray/HD-DVD only benefits the ~20% or so of households who own HDTVs. Both formats also include a downsampling key that reduces the analog component video resolution to sub-HD levels if the studios decide to activate that copy protection feature for future releases. If the forced downsampling key gets activated, it would basically leave about half of the current HDTV owners (those without HDMI video connections) with no improvement in resolution whatsoever from Blu-ray/HD-DVD. The improved audio formats are nice, but you got no DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, or Dolby Digital Plus decoders on the market, other than whatever's built into the players (and the implementation thus far has been inadequate). Basically, if consumers find that DVD is good enough, then Blu-ray/HD-DVD are sunk, because they don't offer up the same degree of improvement to basic functionality that the DVD offered over VHS.

I've been saying for years that the DVD format should have been developed as a HD format from the very beginning. The final HDTV specs were approved back in 1992, so everybody knew what the performance targets were. If the format introduction had been delayed by a few years, then it could have better coincided with the HDTV rollout, and the DVD could have been used to stimulate demand for HDTV. Instead, DVD got released as a non-HD format and HDTV languished for years waiting for HD content to start arriving. As it stands, HDTV has started to take off as consumers have gotten used to getting their HD content from broadcasts rather than disc collections, and DVD has been so successful that we very well might be stuck with it.