HarryB over at OpenSourceCommunity.org recently wrote a nice article about his experiences with Drupal as a newbie. He's got a great deal of experience with both Wordpress and Joomla, and ut surprised me when I heard they'd picked Drupal for their task. In general I've found that Drupal and Joomla are generally both flexible enough for most tasks, and familiarity is often a key factor in making the decision. I was also a little concerned -- those familiar with Joomla and it's very slick administrative backend are often put off by Drupal's much less snazzy and harder to use administrative UI.

And I'm sure he ran into problems that he didn't detail in the article, but in general he wrote nice things about us. And there's one key quote I want to pick out of his article, because it applies to anyone new to Drupal:

Drupal has a highly flexible node-based architecture rather than the more structured "Section > Category > Content Item" model used in many other CMS software packages. It takes a while (or at least it took me a while) for one to become comfortable with this concept as literally all content is defined by node type. And I think the key to understanding Drupal is to realize that nodes are nothing more than pointers to content items and not dwell on the terminology.

IMO, 'node' and 'taxonomy' are what happens when the initial authors of the software are a bunch of of PhD students!