By itself? Probably not. I leave LTE disabled on my Galaxy Nexus to save battery life most of the time. I can't even remember the last time I turned it on. It's nice for tethering I suppose but for normal usage it's not worth the battery cost. If you're on AT&T HSPA+ is actually fairly close to LTE speeds already though the latency is generally higher. I see about 7-8Mbit/sec on Verizon LTE and about 4-5Mbit/sec on AT&T HSPA+ -- not a huge difference.
Same as other guy said. It's so much better than wifi that I leave wifi off all the time (thanks unlimited data!). I can stream netflix/hbogo in high quality with no issues.
Would that still be the case when adoption rate is higher, though?
Does anyone have an idea what kind of internet pipes LTE base stations get, and how much bandwidth they can (realistically) provide to every phone once they are operating at planned capacity?