With that question the only answer possible is 42. There is NO such thing as and NTSC only HDTV. Either it isn't NTSC or it isn't HD. Having a HDMI input I suspect it's not NTSC. DVD was designed to be able to play PAL and NTSC on the same player, they then dumbed it down by dividing the world up into multiple regions and blocking the playback of mismatching regions. All DVD players still do this today only there is a special region that is all, and that is what the DVD players are currently set to.
No Blu Ray player is DVD region free at this point in time. As for firmware hacks - if blu ray activate it, they can "kill" players that have been firmware hacked. If they do or not is another question and how effective it is only time will tell.
HDMI is a transport standard. It's a digital standard, so it can't convey NTSC or PAL (these are both analogue) natively across the cable, they will need to be in some digital format.
Video converter, I assume you are talking about an upscaler. The more expensive upscalers are good (your TV most probably has an upscaler in it), however falls short of a blu ray quality.
As for HD-DVD being region free take a couple of disks in question and try it. Last I heard HD-DVD was not yet available in most (if not all) European countries. HD-DVD is a superset of the DVD standards, so technically can't be region free. If that is the case it won't take blu ray companies long to do the same.
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