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I will indeed be very surprised if the consumer behaves otherwise when HD-DVD or Blue-Ray comes to a shop near them. They will find out it's unrippable, and turn away.
Just to pick you up on this… They're not unrippable. This is actually going to be a big part of the new formats eventually. They wish to legitimise this process and encourage it. Both formats adopt Mandatory Managed Copy (MMC) allowing for the user to rip and store the disc content on their own home computer and media server. Implementation of MMC as I understand it is embraced that little bit more for HD DVD, but it is also present on Bluray as well where it was a rather late addition to the spec. Users certainly won't be without the option to store the content on a hard disc.

Whether consumers may or may not be charged for the privilege remains to be seen however. I remember seeing a video of the HD DVD of Bourne Supremacy from CES and the menu showed it to be free to rip the film to a PC, but there was a small charge to rip the entire disc content (film + extras…etc) and a further charge to store it on more than one device. This could have been created for demo purposes so there's nothing to say studios would not have re-evaluated charging for certain MMC options. We'll have to wait and see.

I think at CES Microsoft did have the Toshiba HD DVD player hooked up to the PC via ethernet and began a live transfer of Bourne Supremacy to the HDD of a PC on the stage. It's an interesting idea. There's been discussion of implementing the managed copy system into standard DVD players in the future as well.