I grew up in an area (North East) where for the most part oil ruled unless you were in town.
The town I grew up in didn't have gas, virtually everyone had oil, while some holdouts still had coal.
The town where my parents grew up and now live again had gas. The house they live in originally has gas service, but I'm not sure if it was for the furnace or not. By the time that my Grandparents bought the house in 1943, it had been converted to a coal-fired boiler for gravity hot water. In 1956 Dad and Grandpa took out the coal boiler and put in an oil forced water system. That's the boiler that's in there today (Mom and Dad bought the house from the estate).
Here in Northern Virginia, though, most people have either gas or electric. There's no gas in my community (built during the moratorium to new fossile fuel hookups in the late 1970s), so I have an electric heat pump.
Mtnbkr's house (he's hunting this weekend, so I can talk about him!) was built in the middle to late 1980s, IIRC, and has gas.
I'd love to have a system where the heat coming out of the vents was actually warmer than from the heat pump, but I really don't feel like paying those insane gas bills.
What I really want is a coal stove and 5 tons of anthricite in a bin in the back yard.