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Thank you Apple for providing me with my first reliable router
I bought the Airport Extreme to replace my absolutely horrible Belkin N1 router. Prior to purchasing the Airport Extreme I experienced constant random disconnects, duplicate IP problems, and insufficient range. I am happy to report that the Airport Extreme solved all of these problems in a matter of minutes, while providing me with a boost in speed and some great new features.

I was incredibly surprised when I saw the fast connection speeds that my new router could achieve. I did not expect a huge difference in speed, as my previous router had wireless N capabilities, but the Airport Extreme proved to be much quicker. The range was also greatly improved. My house has a few concrete walls that absolutely destroyed any hope for decent range on my Belkin, but the Airport has been seemingly unaffected. I also enjoy the incredibly useful printer sharing feature. I can't believe that I went for so long without it.

Above all else, this router is a must buy due to its reliability. I have not experienced one network dropout yet. I have a whole lot of devices connected to the Airport at once (3 PC's, 3 Macs, PS3, Wii, PSP, and an iPod Touch) and none of them have any trouble obtaining IP addresses in a matter of seconds. The included Airport Utility is a fantastic application that makes configuring the router a breeze. It may seem standard to expect great, reliable performance from a router, but none of the routers that I have owned have been able to produce the same results as the Airport Extreme. I can not recommend this router highly enough. If you are in the market for a router, you can stop searching. This is the one that you need to buy.

Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Gigabit) MB053LL/A
Product was received as described and works great! I would definitely do business with the seller again.

Manages my complex home network nicely
Over the past 8 years, I've used the Linksys WRT54G, a Belkin wireless G, and a D-Link DI-524 wireless G. None of these products ever broke down on me, but they all suffered a weakness: the occasional dropped connection and requirement to a hard reset (i.e. unplug and restart). In fairness, each of these routers was $20 - $50, and so the savings over the Apple router was substantial (and ignoring the fact that they are all wireless G vs. Apple's wireless N).

Here's the verdict on the Apple Airport Extreme router. In almost 45 days of continuous use, it has not dropped a connection or ever required a restart in any way. To me, that's worth spending extra money.

I have a fairly complex network:
Cable modem >> Apple Airport Extreme >>...
1. Gigabit port 1 connects to SMC Gigabit 8-port switch, which connects 5 other devices around the house via Ethernet
2. Gigabit port 2 connects to a Vonage Motorola VOIP router.
3. Gigabit port 3 connects to a TivoHD

The wireless router is serving an HP laptop and a Tivo series 2 (both using WPA encryption).

The USB port is serving an HP LaserJet 6L, which has a parallel-to-USB cable. The Apple Bonjour software made this printer a breeze to install. Multiple computers (Windows XP and Apple) now print to this printer.

I also have 2 airport express units (wireless G models) connected to the wireless network to serve iTunes music to other parts of the house.

The setup and configuration of this unit is superior to the Linksys, Belkin, and D-Link. The only minus is that I cannot seem to find a DHCP table that shows me all devices connected to the network (and corresponding IP address).

Excellent Buy
This product is excellent. It took me a couple of tries joining the other computers on my network to the domain, but once set, this worked flawlessly. The usb printer disconnects occasionally, but nothing that unplugging and replugging the usb won't fix. Overall, this is great.

a must if you have both PC's and Macs
First off don't be put off by the price, you can get this used from Apple for only $150 (full warranty) or even less on resale sites. The main advantages of this router are steady (but not super spectacular) speed, rock steady performance, and the incredible ability to mount MAC formatted HFS+ disks and FAT 32 disks with USB connections and any usb printer so that all your computers can read/write/print to them (I don't run linux so can't vouch for that OS.)

I recently upgraded both the PC's (two thinkpads with gigabit wired/ABG wireless and a WMC box I built myself) with our nest of Macs (three minis, G4, G5, ipod touch, ibook) and successively worked my way up from our old Linksys GS up to two new linksys N routers (110 and 310) and the Dlink DIR-655) Never though to look at the Airport since its 50% more expensive than the others. However I wanted gigabit ethernet and needed to access two specific DNS routers for our company VPN. The only one that would do this was the Dlink, (the VPN feature is flaky on the new Linksys models) but none of them had a network USB port so I tried the apple on a whim and am glad I did. Its not as easy to set-up with its arcane menus but it does have an utility that works fine with either PC's or Macs that are hardwired to the router, and it easy to save the settings even if its difficult to find them, thank Heaven for the user groups!
Anyway I have an old HP laser printer and two USB dirves hooked up to this, one was the dedicated backup for the G5, and much to my surprise I can see and print/access all of them from our thinkpads. That right there is more than worth the price difference. As for raw speed the D-Link seems faster on our mixed G/N network though the signal strength from the Airport is stronger a few rooms away than any of the others. Interesting in that the apple seems to have a setting that affects the speed it downloads video files so they don't timeout on buffering. All the other routers would hiccup when I was looking at CNN, film trailers, or other internet news feeds, but not the airport - its sweet and stable and makes watching all those video clips way too easy.
There are a few cons, being an apple product it integrates flawlessly with the Apple hardware, but since my laptops are company secured we can't run bonjour so we had to hardwire access to the disk drives and printers (again thanks to Google and user groups) And it takes a while to handshake with one of our laptops running WPA2 security, but doesn't drop it once it locks on.
If you didn't care for the port options and were only running PC's I think the DLink would be the better choice, its under $100 now and work well in mixed mode like we have and kicks at pure N. The linksys 310 was and okay contender, but wouldn't keep the VPN settings which I need to access our company servers, and it runs pretty hot.