The GIMP has several things going for it. First, there’s the price. I don’t care who you are, but coming up with a better price than free is a tough sell (except that you intend to pay me to use your software). Second, I’m a big fan of multiple monitors so the GIMP model of not having a stage surrounded by tools is great. I use four monitors in sort of a cockpit (or command center, as my friend Mike says) configuration. I put the tools box on one side of the image, the layers / paths box on the other and then I have this huge image area to work with. With Photoshop, I’d have to stretch the stage across several monitors, and that’s just hard to manage.