Dakkon, I think anything with a built-in tuner has to have speakers.
There's no reason not to use these types of devices for HT that I'm aware of. Ray3 was really bullish on the commercial plasmas a few years back.
For most of us here, we would only need a display.. No tuner or speakers... I thought that manufactures had pretty much stopped manufacturing "display only" devices...
I am glad that mark posted this, as this is the product that i would most like to purchase. not the 50k$ one though