Ill have to have think about this but from my limited experience, I actually leave things well alone leaving displays ( or external boxes) to deal with interlacing/ deinterlacing. On the PC I just leave software ( like VLC) to sort it out
I suspect the answer is far less simple than you think. It is format dependent and also depends where you want to display it
It may be too that some of the differences are not really detected by the eye
My experiments when I had a bit more time ( a little younger)

showed it either didnt seem to make a difference or I got weird results depending on which display I used
The only place I have notice a difference in in the encoding of WMV where depending on playback method, deinterlaced material looks "jerky" but this only on a PC monitor , not an LCD HDTV display
I had a DVD player which upscaled ( it had a Faroudja chipset) Behaved well with Many displays.. had quite bad macro blocking with others..
You will get material to play with to your hearts delight very soon. I guess there is no better way of finding out by doing it yourself