Despite already owning the Boynty Pack, I finally decided to create myself a Steam account in order to get the Special Edition of the first game. Following a small review of the game, if someone is interested, but hasn't tried yet.
All in all, pretty positive surprise, espcially because Earl Boen and Dominc Armato reprise their roles. I always liked both of their voice work in MI3. Most of the redone backgrounds look stunning and the music is mostly very good. One poorly done track that irritated me was the music at Stans and I didn't like his voice actor either.
Other minuses come from redesigned Guybrush, as his new hair and face look pretty bad. There's also some graphical glitches here and there, but nothing major. Also some of the redone face portraits look some what off, but mostly good.
The redesigned user interface requires a bit of getting used to. You get your verbs visible by pressin CTRL and you can access your inventory by pressin ALT. This, I think, is because the game is also available for consoles, so they've tried to make it more accessible, but I do prefer the old interface, in which the verbs and the inventory are on the lower part of the screen.
The game also is a somewhat of a resource hog, as it does lag a bit whit my good old 1.4 GHz laptop. The reason I had to play with my laptop was, that from some reason the game just didn't want to work on my a bit more powerfull desktop, no matter what I tried.
So, if you all ready own the original, is this worth it? It depends, I'd reckon, do you need voice acting or not. I found some of the jokes funnier, because of the good voice work, but if you don't need it, then there's little other reason, as I do think the original looks pretty good even today.
I'd give this remake a solid 3 starts out of 5. It's a good way to get the younger generation of gamers play the old classic they might not touch otherwise.

I say yes because it sends the message to lucasarts that people WILL play adventure games if they make good ones

Well there's that too

Then again it also tell them they don't even need to create NEW games in the Star Wars universe, they can just add new art and sound to their classic games (Star Wars or not) and people will buy those too.
So, from little imagination (light sabres, jedi, force powers, rebels, sith lords, the empire, corusant, naboo... all the components are there, figure out some story to put them in) to even less (update the old art for Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Full Throttle, The Dig, and the other classics)... wait, I forgot my point

I wouldn't mind seeing a remake of Tie Fighter.
But I agree something new would be nice.

I bought MI2 Special Edition as well. I gotta say, it was all around a bit better made than MI1 SE. Gubrush looks much better as does the user interface. This time you just click right mouse button down and you get the actions. Inventory is behind middle mouse button.
On the plus side, you can now fully play the game in the original mode with full voice acting, if you prefer that. Also the commentary track by Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman is pretty nice addition, as well the possibility to see original background sketches by Purcell.

This is the school of thought I subscribe to. If they ever make more of their older classics digitally available, on Steam, anywhere, I'm buying them without thinking twice. I can't help but think of the remakes as easy cash cows. And that is behaviour I won't support.

Aren't the remakes harder cash cows than simply releasing the game as it is?

Probably not, the new shiny graphics helps pull customers not attracted to the original low-res look. At the same time the prospect of a faithful upgrade helps keep fans of the original in line.

Yes, that's a very good point. The thing is, the remakes are clearly meant for a different audience, and will definitely make more money to LucasArts than a simple re-release, which will be for enthusiasts only, if and when it happens. Drawing new art and paying for Dominic Armato's studio sessions are costs that the company can afford without really noticing; the most expensive parts of the process of designing and programming a game have all been done and paid for ages ago. So in the end, it's all about their exploitation of the money spent to money received ratio.
In other words, I will always prefer a new game, even a short, simple one, to a remake.

Fair enough.

It's supply and demand. We (read: "I") demanded it, and they made it available due to a whole field or bleating sheep. But paying sheep nonetheless. It's nice to show your younger brother a game that, if unenhanced, he would not even touch.
That said, I hope the new philosophy of upgrading old games won't catch on too much. One thing is exploitation, but mass exploitation...

There's been several commercial "remade" games before MI games. I don't know how big they've been, but at least Cinemware has remade a couple of its old titles.
But I don't think that many bigger companies besides Lucasarts will churn out remakes of their old classics. There's been pretty vocal demands for remade Final Fantasy 7 and Square has been saying, that they'd do it only, if it could be done cheaply enough. It's one thing to redo grpahics to tile based 2D Final Fantasies, but a full scale 3D remake of an old game could turn to be too expensive.

Neither of the remakes replace the originals for me, I guess I am a purist, but I did enjoy playing through them.

They're not supposed to replace the originals, they're supposed to supplement them. Utlimately the game is the one and only important factor and that hasn't changed, new graphics are nice, new audio is nice but they're just recreating the exact same locations, events and script from the original
If anything this is the kind of remake we should all be supporting, they make sure you can play old classic games again, they lower the difficulties for new people to try them by bringing them up to modern standards and then they give you the ability to play the original. There can be no better approach to a re-release than this because it gives everyone everything.