Oh yeah, no kidding. With the choices of Dell and Cisco ... I'd vote for Cisco; mostly because of the service and support organization. The Hardware is really nothing special. Cisco's other strong point is the BROAD scope of products. You can have an all-Cisco network ... no matter what you're trying to do, and still be covered by one organization's service and support.
If you're looking for Cisco alternatives, Extreme or Foundry would be excellent choices.
Extreme is the fastest switch we ever tested. It's rock solid, and probably the best L3 switching on the market. The service and support are excellent as well. Extreme is big enough that you know they'll be around next year (they're global), but still small enough to be competitive (read "cheaper, and bend-over-backwards-to-keep-the-customer-happy"). A very nice feature of Exteme is that the command set is the same across the entire line. If you know the commands for the 24 port workgroup switch, you know the command set for the 1500 port 10/100 chassis (it's the size of a small 'fridge). All Extreme infrastructure switches are 100% non-blocking, unless you specifically choose to oversubscribe the backplane.
Foundry is also an excellent switch, their command set is 99.9 percent "Cisco compatible".... if you know Cisco, you know Foundry (and vice versa). They're very competitive (see above) as well. Other than some proof-of-concept testing for a couple customers, I haven't had much exposure to their service and support. I do know some folks that went to work for Foundry and all that I've heard indicates they are very customer-support oriented.
Generally speaking, for a buisness, hardware reliability is "fer sher" a Good Thing, behind that, you have to be able to rely on the vendor and/or manufacturer to back the hardware up with assistance when things go wrong (forums are nice, but it's no way to support a corporate network), and to get replacements when something dies. Behind THAT you should be looking at the manageability of the active infrastructure. Moves/Adds/Changes/Deletes (MACD) consume most of the IS/IT person's time. Manageability also include proactive monitoring and trend analysis. It's nice to catch something failing BEFORE it fails - it gives you some breathing room, and greatly reduces the Midnight Paging / Vacation Paging syndrome.
As mentioned, for a smaller network, the Dell stuff is probably OK. For critical systems (they're all critical, right?) you have to look beyond the hardware at how easy it's going to be live with the hardware once it's in. Cisco, Extreme, and Foundry would be better choices (IMHO). "But, this is cheaper" should not really be part of the conversation. Get the best stuff the budget can afford. There's more to the cost of a network than the hardware.
FWIW
Scott