I agree right now the cost of the media doesn't make that much sense. You can buy double sided DVD-r or +r disc for far cheaper and not that much of an inconvenience.
I have a new NEC drive coming so I will see how fast the dual layer is...I ofcourse am coming from burning 1x for the last year so even if it is 2.4x that would be an improvement. I usually burn on dvd-rw disc so 4x with this drive with data verifcation will be much improved.
Most movies if you dvdshrink it for just the movie only needs a slight recompression. The dual layer would be nice for those movies that would need to be 64% of size to fit on 1 disc. Otherwise shrink movie a bit is fine for playback on most TVs, and then make another disc of the extras if need be.
Since I back up most of the movies for my son I only want the movie anyways and love taking out the previews and complicated menus of the disney films....