Both are a night and day difference from 128kbps.
Agreed about jewel cases - I have about 150 odd CDs and I just -despise- the cheap jewel cases.
It depends on what you are listening to. High dinamic range (classical music for example) is hit hard by the mp3 compressor.
The box sets above mostly house the jewel cases in a plastic moulding (which helps them not get damaged). The "Tougher than tough" set unfortunately uses the digipak style of packaging, so when the little plastic fingers in the CD centre start failing, the disks fall out every time you open it up and it can't be repaired. Not sure how they managed to come up with packaging that was worse than jewel cases, but digipaks succeeded remarkably well at just that.