As I noted in an earlier post, this same TV with shipping is ~$1350 from www . frys . com. No need to wait. I bought one and it's an excellent TV.
I've noticed that the stores will have these TVs setup horribly and the picture may look bad there. I spent quite a bit of time looking at all 42" Plasma's. They all have excellent pictures. I went with the 9th generation plasma technology from Panasonic hoping for a mature manufacturing process and therefore (I hope), the TV won't die on me prematurely given this large expense.
I've put a good dent in the 60,000 hour life of this TV in just the last 2 days!