First I had a 19'' LCD, then I went to a 19" widescreen... I've never looked back. I was skeptical at first, but I love widescreen now. I am on a 20.1" WS now, and its nice....
One thing though, there are still a lot of games that don't support widescreen. Halo, and Doom 3 are 2 that I can think of off the top of my head.
Widescreen is also easier on your hardware (relatively). For example, 1440x900 is 19" WS and 1280x1024 is Standard. The widescreen
1296000 WS pixels vs 1310720 pixels for non-WS
So for standard, you PC has to render 14720 more pixels.