I purchased the Lightscribe burner to produce labelled CDs and DVDs for my company. I figure that anything has to look better than a printed label stuck onto a disc or - heaven forbid, written using CD pens.
The drive was only £25 from Play.com (who delivered it in no protective packaging at all, just a plastic bag) and comes with a version of Nero that prints using the Lightscribe function.

The label editing software in Nero is a bit of a pain to use, I ended up making the label in Paint Shop Pro and then pasting it into Nero's editor.
When it comes to texts and pictures, the quality is generally fairly good. One thing to watch out for is large areas of black - they look like they were printed on a tired inkjet printer; a bit "liney".

A full size label takes about quarter of an hour to print and this is on top of the time it takes to burn the data as the two operations cannot be done simultaneously on this drive.

The net result is a disk that looks more professional than anything I have produced before and is something I will happily send out in my mail-shots.
Would I use it to label my own music compilations or data disks? No way, too much hassle, but printing out batches of the same image for mail-shots, definitely.

The discs are a little more expensive than the standard ones but I believe it is worth it for the company image, first impressions last and all that.
I hope they develop a colour version soon.