@Medved:
Normally low angle LCDs (with TN technology) have also very bad color reproduction and contrast.
Btw the LCD panel of my W500 has a good resolution (1920x1200), but the viewing angles are so poor that even when you using perfectly aligned you can see brightness differences between the center and the border. I hate it, personally I will absolutely never buy again a TN screen, only IPS or equivalent...

And for desktop screen: last year at work I've bought an Asus VS24AHL (IPS LED, 24", quite cheap but with a decent image quality) and with at maximum brightness (300cd) the measured power consumption is only 21W.

When it is without the redistribution layer, then indeed the viewing angle could be smaller than you need to just view from one screen corner till the other from a single place. This is really usable only for power critical applications, where you aim for just few W for the back light (but it does not make that much sense for desk top, where the signal processing tends to consume 10..20W anyway, so saving 5W on backlight then does not make any sense)

But there are many monitors on the market, all with the redistribution layer (IPS), but differing in how "aggressive" this layer is. And I've seen really a full scale from +/-45deg till +/- >90deg (the margin is there to ensure the color quality at wide angles) view angle, they really differ in the power consumption accordingly (40..90W for a CCFL).
I would guess the +/-45deg is more than enough unless you are regularly working with larger group looking at the same monitor at once, it makes the colors good from more than a single chair position and yet the power draw could suffice with 15..20W with LED's (with newer models the processing power requirement gets lower as well).
Plus when the monitor uses the 2D LED array, the consumption would really be on the lower end of the range.