The reason everyone harps on about LCD response times is the same reason as behind the "megapixel madness" in digital cameras -- it's a headline figure which the punters think is important, but mostly isn't.
Now that the panels are good enough (which they have been for at least a year) it's the quality of the signal processing that matters, which is difficult to measure and understand -- but it's very easy to quote a panel response time (which is largely meaningless).
Similarly for digital cameras -- once the sensors reached about 4Mpixels the picture quality depends on lens quality, sensor SNR, and signal processing, which are also difficult tomeasure and understand -- but it's easy to impress naive punters by screaming "8 Meagpixels!" In fact most of the newer cameras with more megapixels (and smaller image sensors to save money) produce worse pictures than those from a couple of years back, because the image noise is much worse.
I've also seen the same thing happen with LCD TVs, where "faster panel" does not equal "less smearing". Most of the so-called "image smearing" is *nothing* to do with panel response time, it's the algorithms used to convert from interlaced to progressive, do any motion compensation, picture noise reduction, interpolation up to panel resolution, detection/switching between film and video source material, 2/3 pulldown processing and so on.
All this is impossible to specify except as "mine is better than yours" (but everyone says that
Think of how a CRT displays a picture -- the phosphor decay time (equivalent to LCD panel response time) is chosen to be long enough that the image from one interlaced frame (40ms apart at 25Hz) has mostly disappeared by the time the next frame comes along, but is still visibly there when the other frame (with the other half of the lines) happens 20ms later -- so on this basis, the "smearing-free" CRT that we all know and supposedly love has a response time slower than any current LCD TV panel.
Many of the "100Hz" CRT TVs had very bad smearing/juddering on moving images, which obviously can't be anything to do with "response time", only poor signal processing.