I think I know the basic ins and outs of my options when it comes to cable vs. sat. My house is in fact properly wired w/ a wiring closet that would allow central distribution of either cable, or raw sat signal, or decoded sat signal from a box to any room in my house, thanks to the help I got from Kavid mucking around in my attic helping me pull coax & Cat5. However, none of that solves the problem I have with satellite due to the way I want to watch TV.
With cable, I can use the TV in the garage to flip through all the channels provided by basic/extended analog cable service. This costs me nothing on top of the service I'm already paying for, and I have to buy no additional equipment.
With satellite, either I buy a tuner box for the garage, or watch whatever the one sat tuner is outputting and go inside every time I want to change the channel, or pay $500 for an RF remote. Either way, I'm buying at least one extra tuner box, and one extra box subscription; or two of each if I don't want to have to watch the same thing Lisa's watching in the living room.
No amount of clever wiring is going to decode that sat signal into the 70 or so analog channels that my existing TVs' tuners are able to tune to that are available on my feed from Charter.
The real question is whether or not you still "inadvertently" get all the basic/expanded channels on the wire when you have a cable internet subscription and nothing else. They used to (10+ years ago) just install a crappy signal filter on the wire that was easily removable on the premises, making it a cinch to get free basic cable w/ just an internet subscription. I would guess in more recent neighborhoods, those filters are installed off the premises or the signal is sent per-address, making it impossible to circumvent. Ideally, I'd like sat for the HD TV, and cable internet w/ free basic cable for the TVs I rarely watch in the bedroom/garage/etc.