We had the surround sound system in our living room die a sad death, I replaced it with the same brand as my TV and my BluRay player. Now its much easier to control everything as the surround sound remote powers all those devices and controls each of them. As things are replaced I tend to gravitate toward making all the components 1 brand (don't really care which brand so long as all are the same) and it seems to make life much simpler.
The other option is the HARMONY brand remote. They are awesome. Takes forever to program them, literally a pain to program but once its done they are the best remotes I've ever found and work the whole system without having to do anything other than press 1 command and it automatically adjusts everything to accomodate the new function command you press. So if you want to play a BluRay disc you simply press 1 button that says Watch Disc and it will turn on the BluRay player, turn on the surround sound, set the surround sound to BluRay, turn on the TV set, set the TV input to your disc player, even set the volume and, if you have it hooked up, can even dim the lights in your room.