The reason I am excited about HD-DVD is it looks really pretty much as good at 1080 lines are going to look, even these "first generation" releases do in the most part look pretyy artifact free, bluray certainly isn't going to look any better.
DVHS died because of lack of content, so I am excited because I can buy HD quality titles again (on HD-DVD) as the studios are at least releasing product on HD-DVD and I can buy it today.
As I said it takes more than a great format to win a war, and if HD-dvd AND Bluray both fail, I can't see HVD picking up the pieces, I think it would sour the studios for another 5 years at least, and then who knows what format would be available at that point in time. The delivery of uncompressed 1080P is just beyond consumer electronics for the forseeable future, there just isn't an even vaguely affordable bandwidth solution even if the HVD discs were easy and cheap to manufacture, you still have to build a pipeline that can deliver over 140 MEGABYTES A SECOND! (That is over 8 Gigabytes for every minute!)
So there is a lot more engineering than just making a disk that holds a heap o data, you have to get the movie studios to agree, you have to develop fabrication equipment to be able to make the discs for sale, you have to have studios have the equipment to create the videos in that format to make the masters etc. etc. etc.
Everyone has just invested right across the food chain from telecine to edit to mastering to fabrication to copy protection to navigation to delivery in HD using existing codecs and bitrates, it aint gonna change anytime soon no matter what happens in the format war.