I'll take a crippled phone any day over the other complaints (and if my Tour is crippled it's subtle enough that I haven't seen it). There are no perfect carriers but there are less-bad ones.
Well its my first blackberry and I've only had a week or so to get used to the platform so YMMV of course.
tl;dr: It's great at its core competencies: voice and email are great. Everything else is a bit unfinished.
The bottom line is that so far it's good enough for what I use it for. I'm still crap at the keyboard but getting better, the EVDO is fast enough but not spectacular, the roller ball works well almost all of the time but the horizontal sensitivity seems a bit wonky sometimes, I haven't figured out why yet. (There's no way I'm that bad at brickbreaker so I choose to blame RIM)
Email integration is about 8/10, I push email from my gmail account and Exchange at work to it and that workflow is very well executed. However, reading mail on Gmail or Outlook doesn't mark the messages read on the blackberry. It's possible I'm doing something wrong here and I'm not on a BES but it hasn't annoyed me enough yet to really dig for a solution. Also Gmail IMAP sync doesn't respect your filters/tags so if you get new mail it all hits your blackberry. I ended up unsubscribing to a few mailing lists that I never really read anyway because they were just too high traffic to be buzzing me all the time.
There seems to be a bit of a compatibility issue with the Tour and the Storm, most apps that require unrestricted TCP access don't seem to work [1]. I can't get jmirc, midpssh etc to connect, they just die with "Invalid URL parameter." It'll be fixed at some point I'm sure but for now there's nothing app-wise that's useful to me. Viigo is acceptable as a podcast client but not much else. Google Voice client is alright, doesn't integrate as well as I'd like but it's workable. AIM works well, Flickr works well. The apps in the app store are great if you're obsessed about a) the weather b) financial news c) sports scores or d) playing card games, outside of that there's not much there. Then again every "must have app" my iPhone friends show me has me rolling my eyes so I suppose I'm just not the target market.
The voice quality is top notch. I was on a four hour conference call last night and I set the speakerphone up and forgot about it, no issues either hearing or being heard. That took my battery life down from full to about half. The camera is frankly barely adequate. Plenty of pixels but too much grain. [2]
All that said I'm buying my wife one to replace her free-and-worth-every-penny phone in a few weeks so it's safe to say I'm pleased with it. The warts just aren't in places I care about.
Replying to myself for the benefit of future googlers:
The "invalid URL parameter" can be solved in midpssh by switching the connection to TCP/IP instead of Auto. I haven't found a solution for jmirc yet but of course I can ssh to a box running irssi.
A few more observations: the trackball responds better to a very light touch, pushing down even slightly seems to affect its resolution horizontally. I didn't notice this on a co-worker's Bold but it may change with age.
Also last night it silently stopped receiving mail. I came into the office to 97 unread messages that were never pushed. Forcing a reconcile didn't find them but pulling the battery did. If this happens again there will be a chat with Verizon and/or RIM in my future.
There's a small flaw with the headset socket, it appears to be slightly too deep. Pushing headphones in all the way doesn't work, you have to pull them out just a tick. Which is useless as then they get knocked back into place when a gnat farts in the next zipcode. The included headset does work but it's crap. I picked up a set of bluetooth A2DP earphones [1] which are frankly only adequate.