It's really closer to the DVD-A/SACD format war in my opinion - PAL and NTSC are video standards on different continents (not competitors in a single market) and VHS and Beta were the only way to get video at home, but Blu-ray and HD-DVD (like DVD-A and SACD before them) are a more advanced version of an existing format (DVD or CD) whose benefits can only be seen or heard with other special hardware (HDTV's, surround systems, ...).

We won't see combo HD-DVD/Blu-ray players for at least nine months - probably a year or more, since even after more than a year of publicly-announced work nobody's got a disc drive that can read both formats. Heck, we've barely got any Blu-ray players on store shelves at this point, with other first-gen players stuck in the factory while firmware gets squared away.