PS2 games don't look very good on high resolution displays and the CRT acts as a very nice filter.
It's just that PS2 games were designed to look good on CRT's.

I agree. I used to call CRTs "Free Antialiasing." :)

That said, I more often than not play mine at hotels are 42" widescreen HD televisions. It's not the best experience, but it's not too bad.

Ah, very cool, very cool, be sure to hit up the likes of Suikoden and Tales, my personal favorite on the PS2 is Radiata Stories. Unless you want to shell out for the component cables (they actually do help) it is advisable to play Wii on a CRT, Twilight Princess (for instance) looks so much better there than on an LED TV.

In this day and age I don't understand why anyone would want to play PS2 games on a CRT TV where they don't look that great. Like some have said emulation is pretty fantastic and the games look and run amazingly even on internal Graphics cards on PC. The upscaling in the emulators allows you to play the game on your LCD or LED TV through HDMI as well. I am currently playing Persona 3 and it looks and plays much better then it ever did on PS2.

Thank you, I wasn't too sure about what I said. Thank you for clarifying for me as well as everyone else.

With emulation it all depends on which titles you are going to play as PCSX2 emulation still leaves a lot to be desired and you need a PC with a very powerful CPU on top of that, which may be a lot more expensive than getting an old PS2 and TV.
PCSX2 can't run the Gran Turismo games at comparable level with a real PS2 for example, no matter if you have the fastest I7 Haswell.

Well you are correct that not all games are optimized with the emulator but you don't need an i7 for games that are optimized. My cousin is able to run the games fine on a Core 2 Duo with an internal graphics adapter which is a notebook PC.
EDIT: Gran Turismo 3 and 4 are playable on PCSX2 ver 1.1 or higher now.

Don't get me wrong, I love emulation but it is a hard thing to get right, it is basically trying to run a car on diesel that has a petrol engine, but if it works it works.
But on the other hand buying a PS2 is not a dumb thing to do, used ones cost next to nothing and the games are super cheap as well, on top of that you don't have to hassle with emulation and settings, though you also won't have emulation advantages.
Actually I think now is the time to get a PS3, as they soon will be dumped in favour of the PS4 and PS3 emulation is still far away.
I know but it runs super laggy.

Hehe...I like your analogy and you are right, you can get PS2 with games dirt cheap these days so if you are budget conscious and don't like to go through the hassle of setting up and configuring the emulator then it is an easy choice. Also I just got a PS3 at the end of last year and it is the perfect time to get one where there is a huge library of games available and even more still coming out. PS3 emulation I think is near impossible because of the Cell processor architecture which is so alien compared to the almost PC they have now with PS4. Regarding Gran Turismo I haven't tried myself so it sucks that it lags a lot. I do have a powerful CPU but I don't know if it will make a difference because games that lag a lot are just not optimized for the emulator.

Buy the way i already got a PS2, PS3, Wii, DS, 2 3DSs, 2 PSPs, 55" Panasonic Plasma TV and a powerful PC which has 8 GB's of RAM, Sandy Bridge CPU running at 4700 Mhz without a problem and a Msi Geforce GTX 560 Ti.

But i always prefer native environment to play. Games of that era look awesome on CRT. I haven't yet tried PS2 emulation but look at this video, i don't think i can achieve something like that in my 23" HD Monitor.
Plus even the best emulation gives you slowdowns and problems.

Starts at 11:35:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Vk_V9at-s

Edit: Ah and also a 17" Samsung CRT monitor. Diablo 2 looks astounding on that. Totally crashes my 23" Dell IPS Monitor.