I recently purchased one of these gold-plated HDMI cables from a China shop on Ebay, for a measly AU$5.00, and was very happy when I plugged it into my TV/BD system because it worked well.
However! When I tried to unplug it, a slight torque on the cable completely mangled the plug! The "gold plating" is not gold, it is just a bit of cheap metal surrounding the real plastic casing, and is not even connected physically to the real cable. After this incident, the damaged plug is completely unusable, the connection points are all twisted and moved around and there is no way to open it up to fix it.
On the other hand, I really don't feel like shelving out AU$50-100 for a simple cable, so I'm just using component cables for now.