I definitely would prefer my money to go to the right people, thats the same reason I buy Telltale's games direct from them.
Whether any re-release of PST would manage to compensate the actual creators rather than the current licence holders is another discussion...

creator... nope. re-releases never do that.
But if re-release sells well then we may see a sequel and more re-realses of older game (and that is what happened with lucasarts games. GOG probably contributed to that. thx gog :) )

Well, with patience and $40-60 you can get a CD-only copy via eBay.

Right now, about the best chance of it resurfacing is if it was reproduced with the 4th Edition rules.

And that ain't gonna happen - WotC killed the Planescape setting as they released 3E, if I'm not mistaken.

Pretty sure this has been posted but its about PST
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/planescape-torment-retrospective

So, even if it was okayed, it would be a bitch to update.

Great article. Played the game several times, but I still like to read about others finding out how awesome the game is and why :)

Yeah, given how much the system's changed with 3, 3.5, and now 4E (although I'm not entirely sure where the biggest change happened - maybe 2E/AD&D with it's switch to negative-armourclass-is-good that was again reversed with 3E).
Which settings are still active in 4E? Forgotten Realms of course, but what else? Planescape and Greyhawk are long since gone, how about Eberron and Dragonlance? Others?
Eh, wait... according to Wikipedia, Planescape WAS updated to 3.5E, but I'm not sure about 4E.

Well, that sounds a lot more reasonable. If Planescape made a belated appearance into the realms of 4E then an updated version wouldn't be so unrealistic.
But purely from a computer gaming perspective, surely they can see the sense in re-releasing the game, even in its present state? It's not like there is no demand for it. For starters, it's the second highest requested game on this site. It would sell many thousands of copies. Atari & WotC would get most of that. All just for okaying it.

Yeah, but I believe it's mostly up to WotC (or rather Hasbro, who owns them), I'm thinking they allow publishers to sell a predetermined amount of each licensed product, but not that any new products may be created with an old ruleset or discontinued setting. I'm pretty sure Atari would jump at the opportunity to gain more cash that simply.

There really is no logical reason why this game or any of the other older AD&D titles should be held back. Did people play these games for a real AD&D experience or because they were good games?
EDIT: I manged to find a complete copy at an estate sale last Saturday. I paid $3 for it (10 games for $30)! ;)

No computer game can capture the real D&D experience - though Neverwinter Nights (and maybe 2?) very much tried to get the possibility (with custom DM-run multiplayer, not the default campaign) and from what I've heard they've dumbed down 4E to make it fit CRPGs much better by default (thus making CRPG and P&PRPG more similar).
No networked/online game can capture the experience of a few friends sitting around a table slaying monsters with a crapload of dice, dirty character sheets, and day-old pizza slices (and all of them very much needing a shower).
I certainly played the IE games mostly because I thought they were good games, and they inspired me to get the rulebooks as well (though that was 3.5E at the time I got around to it).

D&D had gotten crap since second edition in my opinion, third was a good attempt to streamline a lot of the endless contradictory rules but it oversimplified things too much to the extent that there wasn't much differentiation between classes and skills.
Whilst I've not played 4th edition, a long time D&D obsessive mate of mine has described it extensively and it sounds like the tabletop equivelent of a quicktime event, "a monster attacks, roll 5+ to not die"
Reboots like this are something that can either go really well or really badly, unfortunately both D&D and White Wolf seem to have gone down the badly route

Yep, that's what happens when you want to get more cash by reforming the product to fit a larger demographic. (Or really, the devs want a good product, as all devs do, and "good" is for some reason measured in sales).