flat panels are a stable technology, meaning they might improve to a certain degree, but they are not going to alter radically,......whereas a processor, graphics card, etc are unstable in that they improve in leaps and bounds every so often.............
flat panels could easily be improved with current technology to have stupidly fast response times, the manufacturers however know that they can span it out and take a few years to get there, each year they improve a lil bit, so people who want the fastest go out and buy a new one,......then again in a year buy another one and so on......
also the costs in producing flat panels is nowadays a lot lot cheaper than people assume, the creation technologies are superior to a few years ago which means far less rejected panels due to dead pixels...
in other words the companies are definitely dropiing CRT, not because there isnt demand, but because they cannot make any real money on them nowadays, u any idea how difficult it is to accurately form the glass without defect of any kind for a CRT? a lot harder than it is to create an LCD with no dead pixels!
personally i prefer a CRT for gaming, but prefer an LCD for surfing and chatting and general work......
there will most likely be professional quality CRTs still made for the designers, and its possible a cheap enough model or so will still exist for gamers, but dont hold your breath on it being as cheap as it is now....lol (possibly Toshiba will stand up to the challenge, they still make normal CRT TV's and i understand will continue to)
EDIT: ok, might help if i wasnt so tired and realised there was more than one page to this thread when i posted...lol...seems some of what i've said has been said already....hehe..i do apologise for repeating, altho unintentionally
btw, just like to say something where someone mentioned about the LCD panels being rejected due to too many dead pixels, in regards to what i said about CRT glass tubes, many glass tubes are trashed and melted down again to be reformed due to defects, its like making a massively thick eye glass, has to have perfectly uniform focus to allow the projected picture from the guns to display without distortion.....the profit margin on CRTs is almost neglible nowadays to companies.....apart from poor quality cheapo 15in ones that end up being sold to mugs in cheap boxed computer packages in shops...lol