Hi Briansnat,
Actually I have just been through the Magellan support hell and is really the reason I am still undecided. I like the price and features of the Magellan compared to the Garmin, but am afraid of the tech support.
Basically I have a basic Roadmate 1212 which allows me to also load geocaches as POIs. It works fine. It recently started locking up and acting weird not long after I updated the firmware, so I called them and they agreed to replace it for me. So far so good.
The replacement one finally arrived and I found it had old firmware and maps on it...older than the one I sent back for replacement. I ended up having to call about 7 or 8 times and talked to 3 different supervisors. The first supervisor said he would send me the maps right away. This was great, except he never did. A week later I called again and eventually talked to a different supervisor who offered to upgrade me to a better model, but he wouldn't guarantee they wouldn't come with old maps. I said no, so he said he'd check with the first supervisor and call me first thing the next morning. He never called back, so I ended up calling again. The last supervisor was great and agreed to send me the map updates right away and I got them a few days later. However it was a battle trying to get to that point. Now I've updated the firmware again (crossing my fingers, it's needed for the updated maps) and things seem ok so far but I haven't really tested it too much.
So basically I actually like my Magellan GPS, but I don't know if I'll start seeing the same problems or not, and I'm afraid of the tech support. Don't know if Garmin would be any better though.