A TV is never close to the quality of a computer display. It's great though for certain things:
* Presentations (with large text, as TVs are meant for)
* Games (of some kinds)
* iTunes visualizer
* Watching DVDs and QuickTime movies
* iPhoto slideshows
* Resting your eyes by getting away from the screen--IF you're doing basic work that doesn't involve fine detail (for web surfing, boost the font size and be prepared for crowdfng)
* Emergency measure if your LCD is smashed!
If you want to use a TV as spare real estate for actual computing (seldom very useful), about the best you can do is set it to 640x480 to make the text bigger--and don't use mirroring; that way your internal screen is separate and still useful at full res.
Also look in Display Preferences when connected to TV and you'll see some special options have appeared: "Best for Video" and "Overscan." (Overscan determines whether the image has a black border, so you can see the whole display, or spreads off the edge like a TV broadcast.) Play with those settings, and the screen res, to see what looks best. Tvs only have ~480 lines, so more than 640x480 is generally overkill on TV.
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