Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a designer - purely curious.
I get aoloe 's reaction though. Whenever someone posts something cool about Gimp, invariably a bunch of “yeah it's free, but it's not Adobe Photoshop is it?” comments pop up. Why should we care? Why not judge it on its own merits? This reminds me of how a lot of people used to respond to the notion of using GNU/Linux distributions as free operating systems suitable for day-to-day desktop use. Sure, I get why not ever…
Another thing of value for me is that open source can not die for as long as there's demand. This makes it a safer bet for long term investments. So GIMP may never be on par with Photoshop and the Linux desktop may never happen for ordinary people, but you can bet they'll still be around and probably maintained and developed in 50 years from now, because they aren't subject to the same market forces as proprietary stuff.
Hence the comparison is often unfair. For me GIMP gets the job done, for my needs it is perfectly suitable, works on all 3 major desktop operating systems, therefore it has an unbeatable price tag and license.