A friend got a TV about that size a couple of months ago as his monitor.
While he is generally satisfied he says small text isn't very clear. His is
an "off brand" used mainly for games.

Back in the old days of TV all the video in the US had to conform to the
NTSC standards. That standard included a vertical sweep of 525 lines,
which were interlaced so a single frame of video took two complete
sweeps, for a vertical resolution of 262.5. This is the equivalent of
262.5 rows of "Pixels" in today's terminology. Since the aspect ratio
was 3:4, that means the equivalent Horizontal rate was 350. Thus the
resolution in the good old days was about 350X262.5--pretty sad by
today's standards.

That explains why your computer display looked so bad if you managed to
get it pumped into your TV at all.

Now days the typical resolution of HD TV is 1920 X 1080. There are
other standards even higher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg

The modern display does not treat incoming video from your monitor any
differently than it does video from the built in digital tuner. If you
TV looks good displaying digital TV, it will look good displaying
Digital Video from your computer Video card.

Hooked up a 10.1" netbook to a 32" TV using HDMI wasn't expecting it
but picture was stunning and played HD video perfectly. So I'd say
there's little difference these days and if your situation calls for
using the TV as a monitor you have no problems, at least with HDMI
which I'd recommend.

Anyone using, can recommend, a VGA to HDMI adapter for a netbook?

I wish I had a good suggestion for you.

One thing to watch out for is the inability of the TV to report its resolution
to the computer with most VGA to HDMI adapters. That means you'll have to force
Ubuntu to produce the proper resolution. I have no personal experience with it,
but I've read messages from people who were tearing their hair out.

If memory serves, this was also discussed on an episode of Tekzilla.

Is there some reason you can't use the vga directly? Almost all recent TV's
have a vga input. Mine is almost a year old and has one.

I bought a shielded 25 foot vga cable and it gets a perfect 1920 x 1080
picture on my LED TV from my desktop computer. Only disadvantage is that it
does require a separate audio line. HDMI does both.