Windows Media Center is a good DVR.  It has Pause, Rewind, Fast Forward, the ability to work with extenders to become a multi-room DVR; all very good.

But my Panasonic Blu-ray player takes 480p recordings and upscales them to 720p.  SD programming streamed from Netflix gets scaled up to higher resolution. Windows Media Center does not.

I think this is a serious deficiency as most of the programming coming in over the air is SD (15 of the 22 channels that I receive are SD).  I also think that if Microsoft wants to overcome the less than stellar use of WMC that they have received they should seriously consider implementing a conversion process in WMC that upconverts 480p programming to 720p like my Blu-Ray player

Looking online, this is a known problem in the Windows Media Center community.  There is a program called FFDShow Audio which changes the codec natively used in Media Center to one that does conversion.  However, it is not a simple matter of installing a program.  It requires hacking the registry and replacing system files which is something the average user does not want to do.  So once again, if Microsoft wants to increase the attraction of the average user to WMC, they should consider building this feature into WMC.  Perhaps it would be the item that gets them over the hump to increase user interest in the product.  And ultimately, increase the value of Windows to the average user.