Pioneer Elite, in my experience, are the best line of plasmas manufactured. All around, they are king.
Pro plasmas often lack a lot more than people realize, especially from Panasonic.
The 8UK, I believe, doesn't have HDMI, no ATSC or NTSC tuners, no internal cablecard, one set of component inputs, no speakers. If you just want a plasma to hang on the wall and use without a lot of necessary external equipment, than the 8uk pro line is not the way to go.
As well, I have seen the pro line listing less color capabilities (2 million colors vs. 8 million?) than the consumer line. This indicates that the consumer line has better video handling capabilities than the pro line.
I personally have been opting for the consumer lines as you can just put them on your wall, run cable into them, throw a cablecard in and enjoy a couple hundred channels with nothing else necessary. Very cool.
The pro line works great though if you always plan to use your external speakers, have an external cable/sat box, are using an A/V receiver, and pay a bit more to add the HDMI card to the display. It can save a few hundred bucks overall. But, I'm not sure of the color handling/graphics difference.
