Bub
As has been already said, the Canon is a good camera. It does feel cheap compared to some of the alternatives though and it has some user interface 'features' that I couldn't live with. As a long term Canon film SLR user, the handling of the 350D seemed wrong to me - the buttons to change the metering, AF, etc don't actually change the setting, they are shortcuts to the menu system and there is no feedback of what you've done in the viewfinder, so it's difficult to make changes on the fly (these are firmware issues and Canon may have rectified it if they had enough complaints). I haven't tried the more expensive Canons, so I'm not sure if it's the same on them. As Vuk has pointed out, Canon lenses don't have aperture rings and if you need to set this manually, you use the command dial on the camera - the 350D only has one command dial though, so if you are using manual settings, it's awkward to set both aperture and shutter speed quickly (other cameras use two command dials, one for shutter speed, one for aperture). In my view, the drawbacks of the 350D were significant enough to convince me to sell all of my Canon gear and switch to Nikon, but if you're starting from scratch and don't have expectations of what the camera should be doing or if the drawbacks aren't a problem for you then the Canon is an excellent camera.
Heath