I completely agree that LEDs make more sense than CF. I really have no love for CF as their light quality is poor as well IMO, thou they do diffuse similarly to incandescents. 6500k is way to high for me. At that freq lights get a blue tint to them that I just can't stand. I am looking forward to LEDs to continue to develop and drop in price. I'm just not yet happy with them especially at their price point.

As for life expectancy, for lights that are just used as needed (kitchen, dinning, bedrooms, hallways) I've found CF fail more often than incandescents, at least the ones I've had. When I hear people talk about incandescents failing after 6mo or so I question the use because that is not my experience. In my 3 year old house I have a mixture of incandescents and CF doing similar duties and have replaced far more CF bulbs. The only incandescents I've had to replaced were ones that got "bumped" which I will concede is a weakness of those type. The other downside to them is heat. I will conceed that during the summer I try hard to keep them dimmed in my HT room because there is no place for the heat to escape the room on days when we're not needing to run the AC for rest of the house.

Hmm, considering that Cree already delivers over 100 lumens per watt on commercially released LEDs and has delivered 276 lumens per watt in the lab, I'm not impressed. Good marketing though.

This one delivers between 100 and 140 lumens per watt depending on color temp.

I don't quite understand why you're unimpressed. The NanoLight can deliver over 1600 lumens with 12 watts, which breaks down to over 133 lumens per watt. This product may even be using that LED from your second link.

Of all the things I figured I would experience when I joined this forum, I have to admit that a hearty discussion on light bulbs would be one of them. Round two of such discussion even!

There is a Big Bang Theory episode in here somewhere.

I have not looked lately, so maybe they are ahead of other manufacturers, but that level of light output is in line with current generation LEDs that everybody has access to.

Right, but those are for a single LED, not for an actual multi-LED bulb that doesn't require a heat sink and actually has great omni-directional dispersion.