I was a major advocate of HD-DVD, mainly due to the region-freeness of it.
I have imported well over 400 US, Japanese and Korean DVDs, so multi-region was a must-have for me.
So, when HD-DVD died, I was pretty upset and bought a PS3 to tie me over until region-free players become the norm.
The PS3 is a very good Blu-Ray player. The only downside I have found with it is that its difficult to get a programmable remote working with it (I'm quite a fan of the Harmony remotes), so I have to use the pad to navigate.......VERY annoying when your foot/cat/cuppa knocks a shoulder button by accident half-way through a film
In the end I got sick of most region A releases not working in my region B PS3 (and a lot of them are just not released in region B or have sub-standard soundtracks due to them cramming soundtracks on the disc for all of Europe), coupled with Sony paying off the studios to become Blu-Ray exclusive to win the war, I got so frustrated with their practices that I now just download all Blu-Rays from usenet and either stream them to the XBox360 or convert them to AVCHD to be played in the PS3 (depending on the format they were uploaded in).