Lol, when I was about to edit this, you said that 640x480 is better than TV resolution.
NTSC resolution is 720 "pixels" by 486 lines.
PAL is slightly better by being 720 by 576 lines. Both are over TV. You can debate what was used, but those are the standards.
Well, the NTSC and PAL standards specify lines (525 and 625, resp) in the vertical, but not the horizontal resolution as such, since it is variable (a continuous analog signal). Broadcast TV usually managed over 400 horizontal, but VHS super long-play was often less than 250 horizontal!
As you alluded to, the NTSC and PAL standards are designed with overscan in mind: NTSC specifies 483 lines visible, PAL specifies 576 visible.
So while their visible vertical resolution was indeed above VGA, their horizontal resolution was usually
far less in practice, due to the broadcast or composite signals normally used to transmit them.
Additionally, their temporal resolution is far worse, thanks to interlacing, at 29.97 frames/59.94 fields for NTSC, 25 frames/50 fields for PAL, vs 60 frames progressive for VGA. And since VGA signals are not composited onto crap cable, it produces far sharper images. In the PAL world, SCART connectors with discrete RGB existed, and reportedly produced vastly sharper images than composite or S-Video connectors. (This was used mostly in game consoles IIRC, but I'm not a gamer so I kinda ignored it. Some DVD players did too, I think.) Later, when HDTV started to come along, component video connections also finally gave NTSC and PAL a decent connection, but it was too late by then.
DVD shows NTSC and PAL at their finest, and indeed could look very good.
All in all, though, Halcyon's corrected claim that VGA and NTSC/PAL are "about on par" is pretty accurate.
Yes sorry, I was thinking of CIF. Hence the edit. ;-)
Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)
Heheheh yeah. But at least NTSC's frame rate wasn't visibly flickery to me, which standard PAL absolutely was!