The Arduino is absolutely cool, but the reason I recommend it is that it can be a good start to get introduced to analog electronics, that is even cooler for programmers. As after all the arduino itself for a programmer is just a small computer. Cool but nothing completely different especially if you used to write code in assember or C. But... analog programing, creating an AM receiver or transmitter, amplifying using a transistor, creating an oscillator, well, that is magic.
I actually feel the opposite -- microcontrollers are exactly why I got back into electronics. Being able to write a few lines of code that interact with the 'real' world -- that's what I find exciting, and analog circuits are tedious necessities in comparison.
Regardless of your ultimate interest Arduino (and the AVR microcontroller family in general) is a decent place to start :)
If you do have previous development experience, you'll probably want to move past Arduino pretty quickly. You can pick up an Atmel STK500 development board for just $79, and either use it with AVR Studio or the open source toolchains (avrdude, avr-gcc, avr-libc, etc): http://store.atmel.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=p:1050007
I'm a student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, so Microcontrollers are bread and butter to me, but what really has amazed me about this platform is the number of non-EE's I see and help use it.
For engineers, the idea of using a wii nunchuck to control color LED's is trivial. For an artist or a design it can be world-changing. And our local arduino group does just that :-)
The AVR/GCC library of pre-written routines plus the ability to easily upload "sketches" to the board makes the Arduino environment very approachable for non-propeller types.
They're doing a nice job and deserve the positive recognition.
Here in the U.S., SparkFun and BDMicro have built nice niches in this market.
For those that want to get one or are on the fence, I'd absolutely suggest it. It's only 30 bucks and you can get into playing with LEDs, motors and more exciting things as soon as you get it. Beautiful community, great resources. Hard to go wrong, really.
Perhaps worth mentioning that the Arduino project is somewhat related to the http://processing.org/ programming language (basically sugar coating Java).
I've had the pleasure of introducing many artists to the world of programming via Processing, and am always amazed by the widely creative works that are produced, almost off the bat.
Arduino beautifully extends the same capabilities to analog and digital circuitry. Many artists are greatly appreciative of the new channels of creativity that these two project (as well as others) enable.
I highly recommend it. I waited and had my gf buy me one for christmas because I was afraid it would be a gadget I'd never ennd up using, and I get more upset about wasting money than I do about wasting presents.
I had her get me the inventor's kit from sparkfun since it seems to come with a decent # of starter parts, and has a collection of projects you can do with them. I haven't been able to stop playing with my Arduino and I'm alredy ordering more parts and X10 controllers and such, and I only got through the 4th project before I started doing my own thing like having it communicate with the computer.
