saying you've got DSL is like saying you have a car. There are so many flavors its ridiculous. There is a tweak on the MTU (ethernet maximum transmission unit) you can do to improve DSL speeds. Above 3-4M I havent noticed much difference in MOST websites loading. I get 2-3M over DFITL ADSL and I run circles around people with 10M Road Runnerwhile gaming. The difference is the latency to the servers or ping time (for gaming). u-verse is a beast and each box is feed with 1Gig which is shared by only 192 cust max. In most cases there are only 10 customers on these boxes currently.
Only 2 people on my Uverse section (not sure the technical term). Designated with a 32/5 connection, but they limit web to 24/3.
Flash, pdf viewing, and possibly video chat are just about the only thing that the average user would need something over maybe 3 or 4 mb/s. I agree with jdubb, average users won't really need anything over 3 or 4mb/s on the average day.
jdubb, you tried www.onlive.com yet? I was fairly impressed by it, but even with amazing internet speeds, there is still a bit of a lag.