Surge protectors and power conditioners - Good idea or bad?

Whole house surge protection is a good idea. I also use isolation transformers for expensive electronics. Trouble is that IT can hum when doing their job, so it's best to have them in a utility room.

The only real surge suppression is putting a transformer between the gear and the wall.  Transformer's breaker blows up in a massive overload, gear doesn't. 

I just replaced my Richard Gray Custom 1200 due to wanting to rid my system of surge suppression chokes etc and will install a Seimens FS140 whole house surge suppressor at the breaker panel. He will also be installing ground rods. And grounding the Satellite Dish.

I replaced the Gray with a P.I. Audio UberBuss power conditioner that has a power factor correction of 1 and unlimited current availability while cleaning up the noise leaving no impact on the sound. Just clean power as needed.

Unless you live in an area which is frequented by lightning strikes or your power company executives are crooks, they are not needed.

Whole house Type II (at the panel, not the service entrance) and a large (10kVa) iso transformer with additional surge protection that feeds the sub panel for the system. Texas can get some big-assed storms, though Austin seems to be in a semi-protected pocket; still, the intensity of some of these storms is quite impressive (and somewhat scary) even when we are on the edge of them.
Back east, NY metro, north of the city along the Hudson, the infrastructure was really dated and we'd lose power even in a mild storm. 
The surge protectors won't do anything for brownouts (voltage drops) but I'm generally aware of the state of the grid here and when it gets to be 110F, I am less likely to play the system. Of course, my faith in the robustness of the grid here in Texas was put to the test during the recent ice storm that caused us to lose power for 4.5 days in bitter cold weather. 
The cost of whole house is well worth it; you don't need to buy the uber audiophile one, but can rely on units using MOVs. They'll degrade and you replace them. Obviously, with a direct strike, all bets are off. One started a fire and burned out a fairly large commercial/residental building in the adjacent town to us along the Hudson. I met a guy who got hit a decade before; he got up after the event and finished work. He later went home, where his wife discovered the bottoms of his feet were scorched. He progressively lost heart tissue and at the time I met him, was going through medical procedures in anticipation of a heart transplant. I think a healthy respect for those bolts from the sky is sensible. I used to unplug my main system during electrical storms back east.