I'm British, but I know other British people who drop the H on "Herb"... Maybe we're becoming Americanised, or maybe I just need to drop a box of RPG hardbacks on their heads...
On the d20/non-d20 debate, I'd like to add is that at the end of the day the rules aren't supposed to be the game, the roleplaying is. This goes both ways - for the d20 players, they shouldn't really suffer by having to learn new rules, as they're still playing the same game, just rolling different quantities of dice and checking against different stats in different ways - if your game has degenerated into something where you're worried about the rules more than the roleplaying, you're in the wrong game.
But the same argument works for the "I don't want to play the same game all the time" camp. Babylon 5, Judge Dredd, D&D, Lone Wolf - four completely different settings, different games, and the mechanics behind them shouldn't get in the way of that. If anything, using the same mechanics should streamline things to the point where you're concentrating on the roleplaying instead of the roll-playing.
To both sides of the argument - the rulebook is not the game, the acting out of a fictional part in a collaborative story is. The rulebook is simply the physics that sit behind the game, in the same way as it shouldn't really matter if the computer game you're playing is written in Pascal or C++ (at which point a programmer somewhere is probably going to blast me for thinking Pascal can be anywhere near as fast as C++...). Apart from the background material in it, the rulebook doesn't help you play, it just gets in the way. A good rule of thumb is: the less you need to refer to it during a gaming session (holding all the other players up), the better the game you've bought. d20 rules can help a lot here by meaning you don't have to relearn the basics of combat, but that doesn't mean theres not better, easier to learn systems out there. Standards are good, but we shouldn't lose track of the question of whether we've standardised on the wrong thing.
Finally, I'd like to add that probably 80% of what I like about d20 is that it's standardising things. Not wanting to learn another system isn't laziness, it's not wanting stupid rules to get in the way of real roleplaying (which is done with the mind and the voice, not with rulebook and dice). I'll never be able to take an argument seriously if it's that RPGs should have different rules bases (but different variants - yes). I'm more than willing to listen as to why d20 might not be the best standard.
