Walk around in the American Heating and Refrigeration conference for a while to get a feel of these trends, this was specifically called out by many manufacturers as driven by the green movement.
It's being driven by government pressure to reduce energy consumption and dependence on fuel imports. That isn't a bad thing. It's the sort of thing a responsible government should be planning for.
Heat pumps are expensive to operate, and a nightmare to fix. There is a big movement to build whole subdivisions without using natural gas at all, electric ranges and heat pumps. I don't know why it upsets me so much but it does.
Heat pumps for homes aren't expensive to operate. They are cheaper to "operate" than resistance heaters. I doubt they're a nightmare to fix - I have actually had to get mine "fixed" once. It was still fairly new, and it turned out there was a leak in the tube so the coolant gradually (over the last year) got out. The company came and fixed that easily enough. Since then (January 2011) the heat pump has been running 24/7 with no issues whatsoever. In fact you're not supposed to turn them off at all, the moving parts are supposed to keep moving. So, if I'm away for some weeks I simply set the temperature to the recommended "idle" temperature of 17C, which in practice means it's not really doing any work, but it's not off either.