Short wide screens are a PITA for things like Word and Excel.
Why?
Look at your menus, for one. They only take up a small portion of the width of the screen unless you have really started customizing. This is wasted space at the edge.
And what about the title bar, you really need it to say "Foo.xls" and have the rest of your 1920 pixels wide just sitting there displaying a blue bar with a grey outline?
Bottom line is, it all depends on what you use it for the most. Games and movies, sure, pay less for 1080 vertical. Office work? You may want more pixels, regardless of where they are put, but not in something with an aspect ratio not geared for it.
It seems productivity software is still designed for 4:3. When I moved from a 5:4 monitor to widescreen, I used to maximize the Word window out of habit until I realized how inefficient that was. The document doesn't nearly cover the entire width of the screen, and if you zoom to fit the page width, the text gets huge.
Now I make the window about 50% the width of the screen, so I can have either another document or some other window open beside it. But when I'm just working with the one document, it feels like such a waste of pixels.
Same with websites. Try opening the AT front page in a maximized browser window on your 16:9 screen. The actual useful text covers maybe 25% of the width. Still, you have to scroll like a maniac to see all of the text because you see so little of it at a time. At least browsers are starting to utilize widescreen better, by putting all the GUI elements in one or two rows (even in the actual window titlebar sometimes) to conserver vertical space.
Portrait mode might be a solution, but with a 16:9 screen, you get the opposite problem. It's just too narrow in portrait mode. It looks ridiculous. It's so tall that you can't read it entirely without moving your head slightly up and down, which might eventually cause pain in the neck and upper back.
Also, with vertical space at such a premium, maybe having the taskbar running along the bottom of the screen is not such a good idea any more.