The decision is quite a personal choice. Yes, CCD can image DSOs that's beyond what most amateur telescope can see. However, eyes can differentiate wider range of brightness than computer screens can display. Stars always look prettier visually. As others have said in the newsgroup, there's nothing that can compare the feeling of knowing that a photon travels thousand of light years of emptiness, penetrates through the atmosphere, bounces off the telescope mirrors and lands on your retina.
Imagination is a wonderful thing.
No, but it could be delayed. You will be too busy imaging and figuring out how to better process the images, than thinking about getting a bigger scope. When we take film to develop, the photo store does the image processing for us including adjusting brightness, contrast and colour. CCD imaging is the same, except we have to do our own processing. This give us a lot more power on what the final image will look like.