Just to butt in again...
I received my 25 inch Hitachi plasma in the mail and amazingly so, it actually works! No burn-in!
Now as to my report, it looks pretty much like an LCD panel. However the dot pitch is about somewhere between a TV and a modern LCD so it gives somewhat of a soft look to it, the black levels could be better. The main thing though is even though it still gives old-school games the blobby stairstep look, holy cow does this thing look big on a desktop, even my 28 inch Hans-G doesn't give the same size impression as this 5:4 monitor. Also because of the 256,000 color capability, movies suck, they look like high-res Sega CD FMVs and gradation is almost non-existent. But for old school MAME the games don't look half bad. Anyway it was a unique find as it is not something you come across everyday as evidenced by this thread.
Also note in the screenshots I am running my own custom mame filter I made so that is why there is something of a "texture" to the pixels.
Also one more interesting thing, there doesn't appear to be a case where native resolution looks more stunning than lower resolutions other than being more defined of course, I believe these old Hitachi style plasmas where capable of multisyncing, unfortunately though it can't go down to 15hz, I tried