People want that one cable connection to do it all.

Also, if you buy a good pre-pro, typically the DACs in the pre-pro will be a bit better than the DACs in the source (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player) and you can only use the DACs in the prepro if it has an HDMI 1.3 compliant input.

Lastly, I do think that multichannel analog just takes too many cables and it's better to keep the signal digital until you get to the pre-pro, but that's just my opinion.

At the end of the day, HDMI 1.3 is all about lossless multichannel, and whether you think it's important or not relies heavily on how good you think audio is currently in DVDs or the hi-def sources.

Personally, I think that Dolby Digital and DTS are already pretty darn good and don't really see the lossless multichannel offerings adding much to that.