I think we are interpreting 'looks as good as' in a different way.
If you are talking about overall aesthetics including fonts, PDF may be a good way to view documents. However, for someone like me, I don't care AT ALL about fonts but I found the greyish background extremely annoying. So PDF documents with 'decreased constrast' due to greyish background do not qualify as 'looking as good as' to me.
You seem to be willing to trade off fonts & navigation with decreased contrast, but I don't. I think that is why we don't agree on 'looking good'.
