One of the most important issues, which all in this thread have missed so far is...
Do you prefer hard buttons, or is a touch screen good?
This is always a trade off!
Hard buttons have a better feel, are easy to find in a dark or dimly lit room, without having to look down at the remote. But hard buttons will have fixed labels, and will not allow for every function on each piece of equipment to be on the remote with a meaningful label.
A touch screen allows excellent flexibility of button placement and grouping. Every function on every piece of gear can be assigned a button. There is no tactile feedback, so the user must look down at the remote to use it.
Many people opt for a combination of the above. The pronto's have a few hard button's for the most used commands, with a large screen area for use in programming lesser used commands on the touch panel.
Several remotes (like the MX) use lots of buttons, ch, vol, transport, numbers, joypad, etc, along with a small screen of lesser programmibility than the pronto's.
This is really a matter of personal preference. Think about what you want. How often do you perform functions like changing surround mode, altering input setups, etc. This depends on how the gear you have functions, and how you tend to use it.
Myself, I'm a set it up and forget it kind of guy. I've owned both types of remotes, and I'm still looking for the "holy grail of remotes." I now tend toward mostly hard buttons, and on those occasions when I need to tweak items, I pull the origional remotes out of the drawer. I set up my mostly hard button remote as task based. I really like some of the new harmony remotes.
