I'm not sure I agree with this statement. HD-DVD appears to be doing well at present because Microsoft if dumping a TON of money into HD-DVD. The word on the street (ref: AVS Forums) is that, that may soon come to an end as Microsoft gets it's online movie distribution system up and running. When that happens, Microsoft is expected to cease that funding.
That majority of movie industry seams to prefer Blu-Ray primarily because of it's larger capacity and the ability to record higher resolutions/quality video on the larger disk. I am not sure however, how efficient HD-DVD video compression is vs. Blue-Ray video compression but video quality is not determined by output (1080p for instance) alone.
See above about being the "same thing". Though each is capable of displaying 1080p, the difference is in the quality of the video before it's cut into a disk. Kind of like the inverse difference between an MP3 and WAV file. Both can be made to put out the same quality sound but the WAV file will be considerably larger. With DVD/Blueray, the video can be encoded with a larger number of colors and more bells and whistles for sound (ref: HD sound 1.3).
As for the expense of players... well I suppose that's relative. A Toshiba A-30 (blueray) can be had for $250 from Amazon and comes with 10 free disks. Even at just $20 a disk, that's $200 so the player cost you $50.
A word of caution about this particular player: There seem to be a good number of folks that are complaining about Toshiba dragging their feet on firmware updates. Just a footnote... their update may even be out by now.
This may not be as far off as we think. I recently learned that it takes less bandwidth to broadcast 1080p/24 than it does to broadcast 1080i/60 or even 720p/60 and 720i/60. Stay tuned for more in the coming months.
Note: The number after the "/" is of course, the frames per second. Movies are RECORDED at 24 frames. Interlaced displays that are output to 60 frames are done to reduce the inadequacies of interlacing.