Well, I have to say I'm not a big Creative fan, they've done plenty of things that I don't like, and overall their software in general has been bad (regardless of platform). They've made some ok products, and even some pretty decent to good ones now and again. I have mixed feelings about some of the recent things, where they plan on getting out of the dedicated audio card market and focus instead on software (that is really all they offer that differentiates them from other companies as far as sound cards go). On the one hand it's good, because then you'll be able to get EAX and CMSS-3D (the dimensional headphone effect available with the X-Fi actually implemented some cool binaural headphone effect Aureal had created about 5 years before that), but at the same time, my biggest problem with Creative actually is the software, so I don't have much hope/faith that it'll change much. If they make it so that you could buy tiers of their products for less (and get just the features you want and not a big bloated install) then I'd be more than happy to buy it, just for the CMSS-3D headphone stuff.
I've owned several different Creative products, an Audigy 2 ZS, a couple of X-Fi's, a Zen Touch, a Zen (newer flash based ones), and the Gigaworks 7.1 setup. They were all ok, but always fell short in software. I did rather like the Gigaworks, although they were just rebadged Cambridge speakers, so it makes sense.
Oh, I do have to at least give them some credit for not messing with E-Mu, which make some nice audio solutions (geared towards pros), and software that actually works well (from what I've heard at least).
