... I work with a lot of people writing and producing all sorts on protools and most people comment on how fast and flexible things are here ... certainly the midi features aren't as flexible in Protools as say logic or cubase but the audio editing makes up for it tenfold and more ... and it's so response as well, when you get a loaded session in a host based sequencer things start to get sluggish when you edit whilst playing whereas in protools it's still blindingly fast.

Bit expensive and as you say largely incompatible with VST plugins, although all the native instruments stuff works as RTAS and the Virus TDM plugin is amazing.

And the beat detective thang is blinding it's like having a recycle to chop up and shuffle your audio around at the touch of a key right in the middle of your track. Reverb One's not bad either, sounds better than most of the host based stuff I've tried (but we are back on outboard reverb again at the moment there's something just slightly nasty about computer reverb that doesn't make me want to avoid it as much as possible)

Admittedly we do run a PC along side for the more obscure plugins, particularly the more unstable ones so they don't crash the main system ... it's also pretty easy to us it like an insert on a channel so audio can come out of a track on PT and through the PC like an effects processor then back into protools rig for mixing.

I don't see that the sync abilities of protools are much above the sync capabilities of cubase. I mean I had an atari ST years ago running Cubase which actually had hardware control over my Fostex R8, you could click on bar four in Cubase and the tape machine would rewind, play, lock in time and cubase would start playing too from the same location and that was in 1995 or thereabouts.

The DSP cards for the new protools systems are amazingly powerful, so I think Digidesign may still have a good few years left in them yet. And whilst you may get the same track count and a similar number of plugins now on a fast PC as you would on a loaded protools rig the expanded DSP means you could say run the same high number of plugins but choose higher quality ones with better modelling or smoother eq math.