The Last Remnant demo is horrible, but the full game isn't much better in my opinion. My roomate has it on 360 and I can't stand even watching him play it. He insists that it's awesome, but he has terrible taste in games. For him, the pinnacle of gaming is Dynasty Warriors/Samurai Warriors. When the last one released, I spent two months hearing nothing but hordes of braindead soldiers being ended by him.

I downloaded it, and my main complaint is that I couldn' get my Xbox 360 controller to work with it at all. I found the controls and setup pretty easy to get into, and I liked it. I'll probably buy it when it comes out, if its somewhat cheap. :)
No random encounters == +9001 points

My main gripe was the same as with FEAR 2 - fixed 16:9 aspect ratio, and on a 5:4 monitor that's pretty lame. I've got a new 16:10 screen on its way to me but still, dodgy console ports = poo.

I basically get demos for fun as I don't really purchase many games.
If the demo blows my socks off then I add it to a mental list and wail until reviews come out for it.

Well, In keeping with the OP's original post:
I tried the Bioshock demo.
Didnt like it at all.
About 6 months later, someone brought it up on another forum as THE best game to come out in a long time.
I tried the demo again.
Still didnt like it much, but decided to get the game, since it was like (16? 19? $$$) cheap, and there werent any games I was even remotely interested in at the time.
Turns out, that the game really WAS the best game to come out in a long time.
I feel now that the demo did not go far enough. It didnt show the possibility of most of the plasmids ( the various uses of them).
It didnt show the diferent apsects of the game either.
And yes, I do base my decisions on demo's. But, I try not to try the demo's on my game machine (WAY too many bad experiences: When demo's go bad, part 1). I try them on a work computer (shhhhh) first, to see if it is even remotely worthy of trying out on my game machine.
I rarely ever buy a game that doesnt have a demo.

Personally, I play games for gameplay, and I feel that that sorry of reason isn't an excuse since it doesn't affect the game, and it was fine 5yrs ago - its fine now. :)
As for being a console port, I found it played pretty PCey once I got controls out of 'invisible 360 controller' mode.

Yeah it seems to work rather well, but the lack of any ratios other than 16:9 shows that it was a pretty thoughtless console port. Hardly any PC gamers have 16:9 displays, those with widescreens almost always have 16:10 so even they (me soon) will still have borders. I find it quite distracting and it's kind of a deal breaker.

Wait, are you agreeing with me or disagreeing? When it comes to PC gaming it's very rarely 16:9 as that's a TV aspect ratio. Widescreen LCD monitors are 16:10 and non widescreens are 5:4. I'm not sure I've seen a widescreen CRT PC monitor so that'd be 4:3 usually.
Either way, the lack of anything other than 16:9 in a PC game is ridiculous and unacceptable*.
*With the exception of Braid where it's totally understandable.