>>   I see it as DSL just moving the bottleneck from one place to another.

Oh common.  ALL of networking consists of moving bottlenecks from one
place to another.  Some bottlenecks are inherent (say, a 9600bps dialup
link to the end user) and others are only really bottlenecks if they're
allowed to become oversubscribed.  You can't tell much of ANYTHING about
the expected performance of an end-user network connection without
knowing about the other pieces between you and where you want to talk
to, AND the ISP's policies on oversubscription AND how close they are to
being oversubscribed.  You DO know that your DSL link will not be
oversubscribed, (because it's just you), but that's a pretty tiny piece
of data compared to the big picture.  (likewise, a dialin based ISP
gives you a pretty good idea when they start hitting their limits,
because you start getting busy signals.)

I'll withhold the lecture on the "Ethernet is really only good for
6Mbps" statement, other than reminding people that it's not true.

BillW