After 3 days of intensive training at the centrally and most salubriously located offices of Sitecore at London Bridge I am now a certified and advanced Sitecore developer.  No small feat I tell you, there was an exam and everything. 

So how does Sitecore size up against other major players in the same space? 

This is a powerful solution that presents an intuitive front end to the user via Sitecore desktop, a browser based emulator of the windows desktop environment that facilitates access to a host of great functionality based on user permissions. Here you’ll find the content editor, an authoring interface that is a joy to work with and allows content to be easily created through predefined templates. The media library allows easy management of all your digital assets. A powerful preview function allows the user to see how their content will look in context and a workflow designer enables the design and implementation of simple and / or complex workflows. 

This has everything that a great CMS should have coupled with an ease of use where it matters most, the authoring environment.

Under the hood it's all C# .NET, the industry standard platform. Great for application development.

All in all I was very impressed! This looks to be a feature rich, easy to use and stable looking solution.