This question, in my personal opinion, cannot be answered objectively. Those, who are beginner, cannot answer this question because of lack of experience. Personally, I chose Xilinx FPGAs and Digilent development boards. My motivation was quite rational. In university, I study in, they have several development board by Digilent, and some tutors have experience while working on them. So I bought myself Nexys3 development board. I suppose, it is not so important, which platform to choose for beginners. After some time, more experienced beginner will be able to find advantages and disadvantages of both platforms. And what concerns professional users, I believe, that for experts those advantages and disadvantages are not so important. They should know all platforms.You know, similar discussions are always popular among the programmers or engineers. There always were such discussions as AMD vs. Intel, PIC vs. Atmel, Delphi vs. C++, IE vs. Firefox and others. Remember, when was the last time, that you argued somebody about the similar topic. Similar discussions I hear quite often. But at the moment, I am not ready, to discuss those differences between Xilinx and Altera. I am not enough experienced to do so. Shortly saying, this decision depend on you.
