I'm sticking with nVidia, not because I think that they have the ultimate cards, but because their software and video quality is better than ATI's. Despite your claims, you show a clear preference for ATI. The competition between ATI and nVidia has been good for consumers, just as the competition between AMD and Intel has been. My money's on nVidia, as they always do better when it comes to quality. nVidia is going for tessellation to improve quality, ATI is going for pixel fill rate. The two companies are taking different approaches to quality.
nVidia's 500 series has better power envelopes than their 400 series, but not as good as ATI's. ATI's newer designs do have a better power envelope. nVidia has always out-performed ATI on every type of quality test.
I would give both ATI and nVidia an "F" on their drivers, the same as every other video chip developer, but even so, nVidia's drivers were always ten times better than ATI's. It was almost like getting a new card every year. Unlike ATI, nVidia drivers came out on a frequent basis and there was nearly always a noticeable improvement with far fewer bugs than ATI. When my computer croaked, my new computer came with an nVidia card of a comparable generation and ability. I had what at the time was a mid-range version of ATI's newer designs, and after at least a year, there had been practically no improvement in their drivers. I always thought that ATI had the better hardware designs, but their software efforts have been feeble. It's interesting that you continually push ATI while claiming to be neutral. An argument can be made that ATI also currently has a price/performance advantage, which matters to most of us. Power consumption is an issue, I hope that nVidia will continue to improve in that area, where ATI clearly has an advantage at the present time. I'm not a gamer, as long as the frame rate is adequate, I don't care which brand scores a few percent higher.
It may take off in the long term, but so far it's also a flop, as almost everyone continues to stick with CUDA. It was a flop, so some people started the open-standard OpenCL which is hardware independent. ATI had their own API to compete with CUDA.
There has been very little interest in Stream because it was so late to the party, without offering any advantages and without the proven ongoing development and track record of CUDA. nVidia has been selling their products in the supercomputer market for some time, as well as making the arithmetic capabilities of their consumer cards available for those who can't afford even an inexpensive supercomputer. You don't get it, CUDA/Stream aren't about HD decoding, they're about making hardware originally designed for graphics available for specific computing applications, primarily parallel high-precision arithmetic operations. Media Expresso always supported CUDA, CUDA was being used long before Stream. You're still trying to rewrite ATI's history. It is oriented toward files and streaming, not optical discs, it supports VC-1 Advanced Profile but doesn't say anything about Blu-Ray compliance.
You can use the trial Pro version 4, I've been using the free version. #35, mike, one problem with your VC-1 reference is that it's old, only up through Expression Encoder 2.