Sony Vegas is really the industry's little secret. It's a great program that virtually no one knows anything about.
Last year I did a comprehensive survey of all the commercially available software packages for PC going from Avid XPress Pro down to U-Lead. Avid was indeed powerful but a nightmare to integrate and keep going. It likes only specific types of hardware and needs specific drivers to work right. It also needs a pretty muscular machine and lots of RAM and disk space.
Sony Vegas turned out to be the surprise. It has an easy and intuitive interface so you can figure most things out pretty quickly. There is documentation... but it's on a PDF file. The manual is over 300 pages and goes into a lot of depth about the power of the program. I've found the best software is the kind that allows a newbie to generate decent work but has the power under the hood to handle most anything an experienced user needs.
The other nice thing about it is that it doesn't need a supercomputer to run. I tested it on a four year old AMD XP Athlon system with a Barton core... 64MB AGP Radeon 7500, 512MB of RAM, a 20GB system and 200 GB PATA 5400 RPM data drive... hardly cutting edge hardware. It ran candy dandy... very quick and responsive, even on the renders. I even put it on a DELL Latitude D800 with an older Centrino and it was great. It's a nice laptop solution for editing on the fly at locations.
There is a downside, however. Since it's a SONY product, there isn't a lot of support built in for non-SONY CODECs like DVCPro and DVCProHD. In fact, no support. There is a 3rd party plug in which will allow it to digest DVCPro footage, but I haven't tried it.
For min-DV, DVCAM and HDV, Vegas is really nice. It's also cheap. The full v7 package is available for under $500.