I don't know where the adage of 16mm=1800 lines comes from. That's not really correct. Film doesn't really have a fixed resolution anyway. I've worked in 16mm film a lot for various television series, and I would say that a 16mm negative done with modern 35mm lenses and new film stock is roughly equivalent to about HD 1920-x1080 resolution. In terms of the detail level you get, I would say it is roughly comparable, but this is just a ballpark impression on my part.
However, 16mm prints of Star Wars aren't newly shot negative. They are old, and they are so worn that there's nearly no point in working with them because of the severity of the inevitable damage and dirt. However, even if they were clean, the detail level is probably not much better than standard definition. The type of home telecines like Puggo's will benefit from using HD cameras, but only because the camera quality is not good you need HD to get the detail of a professional SD scan. But then you have exposure problems and stuff too.
Anyway, I'm not sure if a 16mm scan would be better than the GOUT. Puggo's stuff is more for the novelty than any practical purpose. I would be interested in seeing what an HD telecine looks like though, because I guess if you processed it enough it could start to look pretty good (look at what Avisynth scripting has done to the GOUT, for example). But in general, 16mm prints don't have much practical value in terms of creating a high quality preservation. The quality simply isn't there to capture. Like I said, 16mm negative from 2010 will give you about HD resolution, 16mm positive reduction prints from 1977 will give you the detail level of a VHS tape, roughly speaking.
35mm, on the other hand, ought to be useful, depending on the quality. You still have stuff like dirt and scratches, and it will be tons of work to get rid of these. But just in terms of resolution, even though 35mm negative will have more resolution than 1080p HD, release prints don't. In studies conducted they have been found to be on average something closer to 800 lines, although in my experience they are closer to the resolution of typical 1920x1080 in terms of detail level. So, 35mm ought to give you pretty good quality picture, not as good as anything you would see on BD or even broadcast HD, but it should be better than a modern DVD and would look quite nice when see in high definition. The biggest problem is fading and scratching though. If you wanted to restore an entire print from top to bottom and get rid of the scratching by hand-painting it all out, it would literally take you years. Computer programs are helpful, but they soften the picture and basically hide the dirt. I'm not aware of anything comparable to professional custom-software that some post houses use like Lowry that actually paints over the dirt--the amount of hardware Lowry has to use is pretty intense, so I'm sure it will be a bit longer before this is available commercially. And then of course you have the fading. I have my own theories on how to treat this, but you can see in Puggo's 16mm that there usually isn't any colour to pull out because it no longer exists. It's a difficult thing to deal with on material this old that likely has not been stored properly.
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