Hanns-G makes a great 28 inch 1920x1200 (1080p) HDMI screen, it is a TN LCD at 3ms... the contrast ratio is only 800:1 which i personally find just fine. (just means that there is some backlight bleed and the blacks aren't as dark as they could be) It retails for about $450-550 wich is considerably less than 30 inchers. They include DVI to HDMI cables and unless you want to spend the cash on a reciever or a hdmi hub you have to physically take out the cable and plug in say your x-box (with hdmi cable) to switch to it. Small downfall for a great panel at a cheap price.

There are multiple benefits to having larger landscape monitors with high resolution, as you can put fonts into a readable format at a smaller size and still read them. Whereas with a 21" monitor at 1920x1200 i would end up covering a fair ammount of my viewport between mods and chatwindow, which would definatly take away from gameplay. The other big one is not having to sit nearly as close to the screens.

Upscaling is taking a smaller resolution and essentially adding pixels and then blending. Which is not the case with say my 42" plasma, it runs a native 1080i which means that the video card updates the odd line and the even lines seperatly, at 60hz this means that each set gets updated 30 times a second, still beyond the rate at which you can see, but you will notice a bit of motion blurring at times to a very small degree. Since your eyes do their own blending and much better at the range you would be at to play on one, this produces a "smoother" picture. Nevertheless there is no upscaling involved. The only way upscaling would be involved is if the tv's native resolution exceeded what you could send to it (not sure how you would expierence that these days), instead of leaving black pixels it averages the neighbors and fills it.

Plasma does burn in at faster rates than LCDs; and yes any monitor will burn in with enough time of the same colors being displayed. This can be overcome by having a fast color changing screensaver running on it while you aren't using it rather than just turning it off. There are even programs available for download that force feed a "dead" pixel with rapid color changes to help get it unstuck. But for your investment, LCD is worth the money if you can take the lower contrast ratio.