I have been researching this issue for about 2 years and have come to the conclusion that you get what you pay for. My basic problem with surge protection equipment is that most units employ Metal Oxide Varistors in their circuit design. The MOV's all have a rated life ie. so many hits at so many volts, but the surge protection units they are inside do not. Also many surge units send the surge to the ground pin. Like I really like the idea that my ground referance for all of my A/V equipment is now at what ever voltage potential of the surge. This can travel up through the chasis and into all of the interconnect shields to everything in my system before it finds a true earth ground somewhere. Good luck proving that a surge unit failed to protect your equipment when it was nuked by a spike that followed the ground on an interconnect. Also I don't like the noise that a battery back-up unit produces on the AC line. It is not a true sine wave coming off the batteries.
There is a product by ZeroSurge that impressed me but is only part of the answer to protecting expensive Home Theater gear.