The truly energy conscious consumer will bypass the compact fluorescent and switch to LED lights, where you can get a 60 watt equivalent light from an 8 watt bulb!

Yeah, but they suck at "white" light, or anything in the color spectrum you usually want indoors.  If you don't mind things having this odd purple glow about them though....  There is a reason most LEDs you see are colored.

I have, I think, at least three different types/brands of compact fluorescent bulbs in use at my house. There were comments in the submissions queue about buzzing bulbs, and bulbs that don't turn on immediately, but I've found that those problems are only with certain bulbs. I have some that turn on immediately and are utterly silent.

There is still the issue of warming up to full brightness. The good ones reach full brightness within a few seconds at room temperature, and that's a crucial point. I have a CFL in one of my outdoor fixtures, just outside my back door. In cold temperatures it can take quite a while to reach full brightness - in fact in sub-freezing weather it's light is all but useless for 1-3 minutes and it may take 30 minutes to reach full brightness. I've considered replacing it with an incandescent bulb, but it's a light that I tend to leave on much of the time, so I'll probably leave the CFL for the power savings and put up with the warm-up time.

I'm not at home at the moment, but I'll try to post some brand names later of the good and bad bulbs.

We have some ikea brand CFLs around the house - they're decent and there really isn't any big delay in them coming on (maybe half a second).  They aren't quite as nice as old school bulbs, but they use so much less electricity that it's hard to justify not using them. To anyone that tried them in the past and didn't like them - I'd second what everyone else is saying and tell you to try them again; they've come a long way.

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

I don't get the point of outlawing incandescent bulbs.  That is just going to make it a pain in the ass for those of us who either have a legitimate need for the kind of light that an incandescent produces or who just like them and are willing to pay the extra cost of electricity.

If the state really wants to do something they should simply tax electricity.  That should fix the problem.  But they are always trying to cook up some stupid policy that backfires.  For example, the PUC came up with a dumb plan, currently in force, whereby if you reduce your winter natural gas usage by one third versus last year, you get a big rebate.  But they seem to have overlooked the small fact that using less gas is its own rebate: you pay less for the gas!  And those of us who have never been wasteful gas users?  No rebate for us.

Last point: incandescent bulb is only "inefficient" if you need to cool your house.  If your house is heated, they are 100% efficient.

I have a bunch of these at home. My wife's not crazy about them, but she's getting used to it. I think they're great. I have ones that are different "shades" of white. I'm not sure of the technical term, but some are more blue, some are more yellow. In other words, some are more like sunlight and others are more like incandescent bulbs. I use them in differt parts of the apartment. The 'cleanest' one, from Home Depot, I have in the closet. It really helps me see every little piece of crap I have in there. The ones in most of the house are from IKEA, and I don't like those as much, actually.
It makes me feel better to be burning up less watts, and I don't hear any buzzing, and it doesn't bother me to wait 60 seconds for the bulb to get to full brightness.
We do have incandescents in a few fixtures, where there's a dimmer switch. I tend to run these dimmed most of the time anyway, so I'm not likely to change them (can't dim the cfb's)

Now with caps!

Of all the bulbs in my apartment, these compact fluorescent ones make up the majority (3 of 4).  The rest of my lighting fixtures are regular fluorescent lights in unconventional shapes (circular).

Before using the c.f. bulbs I always hated turning on a light and hearing the familiar filament breaking sound and the flash of light before dark.  Mostly I hated it for the fact that I never had a stock of bulbs so I ended up having to switch out bulbs from less used lights until I could get to the store.  It's nice knowing that I will probably not have to change the c.f. bulbs for as long as I'm going to be in the apartment.  Also, the light of the soft/natural style c.f. bulbs are much more soft/natural than the soft/natural, circular fluorescent bulbs.  Thus I tend to use the c.f. bulbs more.