Hi Mr. T,
alpine skiing in Sweden went on pretty much unnoticed by the general public until early 70's, when "all of sudden" Ingemar Stenmark started to win races. Of course, there were resorts, as well as people doing alpine skiing long before Ingemar, but at least for us in the southern parts of the country, we didn't pay much attention. All that changed with Ingemar. All of sudden there were alpine ski clubs popping up everywhere, even in Stockholm area (which is faily down south), and everyone wanted to race. Of course, there were also people who wanted off piste, but the main focus was skiing on well groomed slopes.
At some point (maybe at the "discovery" of snowboarding) resorts started to offer fun parks, and nowadays, if you look at the teenagers on ski, I'd say that more than half of them have twin tips, and spend their time in the fun park. Racing is still popular (maybe because of the success of Pernilla Wiberg and lately, Anja Parsson), but I guess there's been quite a lot of drain from the racing sections to the ski cross & big air sections.
Now, the above is for those who are pretty serious about their skiing. Obviously, quite a lot of people go to the resorts just for a nice winter vacation, and skiing is only one of the activities (After ski comes to mind...
Most of the major Swedish resorts are actually not up in the northern most part of the country, and therefore, they often do rely upon machine made snow. So, powder skiing is quite rare here. For that, you have to go to the most northern resorts (which are not that many) and that's quite a distance: for instance, Tarnaby, which is where both Ingemar and Anja Parsson is from, is some 1000km from Stockholm, and 500km from a major airport, so it's almost easier to go to Italy/Austria/France/Switzerland... And of course, our mountains here are more of "hills", at least when compared to the alps, so we simply can't match the run lenghts nor the number of pists.
Wrt. reviewing PMTS videos in Italy: I completely agree with you: maybe we might be able to persuade Harald to have a camp in e.g. Bormio, which I think is a very nice place, people are very friendly, seldom crowded, and always excellent food!
Cheers,
Tommy