My wife is duly impressed with HD video, and clearly enjoyed Perfect Storm and Patriot in HD. However, she can take it or leave it. She's not really a videophile like I am, and she's often doing needlepoint or something else while we're watching tv.
She has several complaints, some of which are valid, that has sometimes made her switch back to an NTSC feed after I've left the room:
In her mind, it's a complicated thing to set the receiver to HD, then tune the tv to the correct input. She just wants to turn the thing on and watch.
Dropouts have caused us to miss crutial dialogue, which is frustrating.
Lip-sync problems from ABC make some shows (Dharma & Greg) impossible to watch.
Stupid glitches by network engineers who don't know which switch to press to change back and forth from the SD and HD feeds are a pain. Suddenly switching from glorious 1080i to upconverted 480i looks like crap.
In a nutshell, she doesn't go out of her way to watch HDTV like I do, and in the long run, doesn't really care. She's missed most of the great PBS specials I've seen. If we had the Discovery network channels in HD, she'd definitely be watching more HDTV.