It's very important to balance visual attractiveness with the usefulness of the information provided.
A given map may look very pretty, but it's essentially eye candy: it conveys little to no practical or useful information, but impresses the viewers at home so much anyway because it's in pretend 3-D, or spins around a lot, or has lots of animation, or shows something in a very different way.
Displaying weather information doesn't have to be done in a boring way, but neither does the information have to be obscured to show off the computing power of the latest equipment the TV station bought.