What Cale forgot to mention was that X-Plane is FAA approved. That is to say, it's the only consumer based flight sim in history good enough to be used to clock REAL flight hours! This is providing you are with an instructor in a full motion sim with 360 degree views, however, the flight model you get, and the planes you get, are exactly the same. This makes for the ultimate flight sim experience. And that is a fact

Also, with the advent of x-plane Version 8, we now have have much higher detailed world scenery (this is very close to release). This scenery has the coastlines mapped extremely accurate, and has almost every road in the world mapped! Road's may not be that accurate in other countries, but they are virtually on the dot inside the US. To see screenshots of this new scenery, visit http://www.global-scenery.org/ or http://x-plane.com/v8shots.html
The screenshots showed there are DEFAULT scenery, the whole world will have detail like that

With the addition of plane maker and world maker, any random joe can make a plane or a custom photographic scenery package. This Makes for a huge data base of aircraft available on www.x-plane.org
The price for this product is definatly justified, providing the flexibilaty of use, 3rd party additions available and the quality of experience gained by using it. 10 out of 10