To state what is perhaps obvious, my problem in all this is simply that, yes, I can zoom in the image until it approximates the original aspect ratio, but when I do so, I'm losing pixels, and that means losing image quality. Of course, it's not like the difference between BR and DVD, but still...
At BR.com they included one shot of the butcher's shop from the first two minutes of the disc, which apparently are window-boxed. If you compare the above shot to the window-boxed version, you can see that it's lost information on the top and on the left-hand side. I tried superimposing the two...