[Glyptodon]

I don't have a smart tv per se, but my TV does have a USB port, ostensibly to play back video, music, and pictures or something, all three of which it pretty much completely fails at if anything is the least bit atypical. Though it does mostly work with the pictures. I'm not sure why they even bothered.

Of course it wasn't even a smart TV and it took me ages to figure out that I needed to enable 'gaming' mode to make it display my PC's output over HDMI without zooming or making the colors really bizarre.

Count me in the camp who wants TVs to be more like monitors. In fact, if you could get a 40 or 42 inch monitor for the same price as my TV, I'd have gotten the monitor. However, a decent TV is often a half or a third of the price of an equivalently sized monitor, even at the same resolution.

Presumably TV IPS (or S-PVA, or PLS, etc.) panels are somehow cheaper than monitor IPS (or S-PVA, or PLS, etc.) panels? (Or maybe TV demand is higher enough volume for there to be meaningful economy of scale difference?)

[brigade]

Very few TVs use IPS, since IPS tends to have worse black levels and pixel response time than PVA/MVA (alternatively: it's more expensive to get equivalent specs out of IPS), which are the two specs that TV reviewers care about (black level in particular is the absolute king). IPS's strengths, viewing angles and especially color accuracy, are nowhere near as important to the reviewers, and also not as rigorously measured. And being color accurate is actually considered a detriment in showrooms.

[Glyptodon]

Your point is well taken, and using IPS as a shorthand for 'non-TN' was a mistake, especially with the large number of ostensibly different panel types around now.

However, I still think that generally TVs using the same panel size and type as a monitor are cheaper than the monitor equivalent, especially 32" and up.