With some work, I've gotten good results using my ATI All-in-Wonder cards. However, I now use a Hauppauge PVR250 to get tapes (or TV) onto my hard drive. I think the quality is quite a bit better.
I have a number of tapes of old television shows (e.g., DangerMouse) that I'm slowly getting onto the hard drive. Then they can be viewed from anywhere on the network (and burned to CD, in my case). The tapes are in pretty poor condition (lots of color bleeding) so I'm not recording them at very high quality.
I haven't used my VCR to record in a long time. I record either directly on the computer or using a Panasonic ShowStopper (ReplayTV). Now, the VCR is just used to play back into the computer (and to act as a TV tuner).
I didn't read the entire Forbes article, but it talks about getting your home-movie video tapes recorded onto DVD and then you'll watch them more often. This was the same argument that was made when people started copying super-8 movies onto video tape - now they'd be so much easier to watch that people would watch them more often. I don't think anyone ever watched them.
I'm not sure getting tapes onto DVD will be much different. However, the potential archiveability is much better (but you may need to make copies of your discs every n years). I think the real revolution will come as more people have video stored on computer - it's much easier to watch things on a whim when you can click a remote button without having to get up to find and load a disc.
