You're right, the remote control does look good, however it's very susceptible to greasy marks.. not good when you're eating a pizza and need to change channels!
Overall I'm pretty impressed with it; the design is excellent and the picture quality is great. There are problems with Pixel Plus 2 when there's certain kinds of movement.. it gives a noticeable halo effect around the object. However it just depends on the program. On Green Wing (Fri C4) it was awful, but on Parkinson it was fine and gave an excellent level of detail to people's faces.
Since you can turn off P+2 I'm not disappointed. And the playback with DVD and (possibly more importantly) DivX/Xvid is fantastic.
I've attached some pictures from a house I moved into last week -- the first picture is the TV I made do with before the new one arrived....
Matt.