In Modern Warfare 1&2, I played the campaigns all the way through. I liked the first, and I loved the story in the second, but it was too short.
But Black Ops... Disappointment. As OP said, everything up until the great escape is... Not even okay (though I did like the escape scene), and shortly thereafter I stopped playing. Overall I was disappointed, but really, what did I expect?
Still can't help but feel that the devs should be punished for this, the singleplayer was SO below standard.
"It's a multiplayer game dude!" - Then remove the singleplayer alltogether and don't make the game pretend to be anything else than a multiplayer cashcow. Honestly, by this point, the only reason that CoD has singleplayer is to excuse the setting and the weapons used in it, which is not even good in Black Ops.