I can't understand the love for the 3com range. That's been my main issue with HP - the ProView stuff (now called Aruba) is fine but not hugely cheaper than Cisco, but they were up until recently relying on the parts from different acquisitions (3com, H3C) to fill the holes in the portfolio, which means different types of CLI, different terminologies etc. that you might as well have been giving people different vendors to try and work with. Their warranty is good but Smartnet isn't that expensive even if TAC are useless (there's an email address that you can send a case number to and it gets re-queued and assigned to a different agent, I can't find the details on it at the moment), Extreme's support isn't that expensive either as a percentage of the purchase price, and the same CLI operates across the product range. I wouldn't let "access to quality support costs money" be the barrier to purchasing a switch model, since you'd probably want the optional HP support anyway if you were doing an important deployment.
Ultimately when you aren't buying total crap like D-Link, Netgear etc. then anybody with a bit of networking knowledge should be able to figure out these things, and HP do supply conversion charts to put common IOS commands into ProView / Comware language (I hate Comware with a passion) so it's not all bad. I don't think there are huge savings to be had when choosing between the high-end vendors that aren't Cisco who are increasingly dining out on their past reputation as opposed to bringing much new stuff to the table. Just use what's comfortable - I wouldn't buy a Juniper guy an HP switch to save a few hundred quid because it's not worth it.
