First, I'm a Senior Design Engineer with an interesting CAD background.
I was "born and raised" on Autodesk products from 1983, when AutoCAD was less than one year old!
For many years, I was a CAD manager who managed over 100 users of AutoCAD at a time. I've trained countless users and wrote hundreds of LISP routines, many of them still invaluable for editing drawings. I have all the desire in the world to WANT to like and use Autodesk products. I used MDT off and on for several years when it first came out. I now have Inventor 5, which is an impressive improvement for design work over MDT, although file management is a little more convoluted.
That being said, I started using SolidWorks in October of '96. I could not believe how easy and intuitive it was to model with. I learned it and became proficient with it much quicker than with the Autodesk counterparts.
For designing, modeling and creating drawings from my models, I find SolidWorks much more enjoyable to use than Inventor, so I'm getting a lot more practice with SW. Unlike the guy above, I do NOT find Inventor to be intuitive at all!
If you have a large database of 2D AutoCAD drawings and think Inventor will make it easier to migrate to 3D by using that legacy data, think again. We find that it is ALWAYS faster and cleaner to start a model from scratch than to import the 2D data and try to massage it into sketches for 3D features. We want to have more control over how imported 2D sketches are constrained.
I've also got to say that SolidWorks as a company is much quicker to respond to users needs than Autodesk. They consider their customers to be an investment, not a captive audience. You also won't lose the equity you have in SolidWorks like we did with a couple licenses we had of AutoCAD R14.
Good Luck,
Tim