Many people on this forum know a heck of a lot more about this than I do. But I think times they are a changin...what was the defacto standard may not be that anymore. Lots of people who are doing professional level editing are no longer employed by large corporations and are doing the editing in a bay in their houses or using a small storefront facility and cannot afford an AVID setup.
A couple of years ago my mentor got into video. He has an amazing facility that basically did audio for commercials but he saw the handwriting on the wall and realized that if he was going to continue to be profitable he needed to get into video. He had 8 audio post studios all equipped with Fairlight consoles and he turned 5 of them into video post rooms and left three as audio only rooms. When he originally made the decision to go into video he went the AVID route but soon started to regret his decision. Lots of problems, high maintenance and upgrade costs and the system could not do what he wanted it to do so he switched over to Final Cut Studio and has been turning out amazing work ever since. He does a lot of work for large high end clients like McDonalds and they have been super impressed with both the quality of his work and the timeliness of the projects he has done for them.
When we made the decision to get into video, about the same time, we went the Sony Vegas route since we were mostly PC based but soon switched platforms and went with FCP and we too have been very pleased with the quality of the product and the ease in which it lets us turn out multiple projects in a short amount of time. My creative director loves FCP and he is the one that has to turn out the projects on a day to day basis.
Today many TV shows are cut on FCP and it is getting used more and more by the motion picture studios for cutting major motion pictures. This has always been the area that AVIDs excel in. I found this article interesting
Cut to the chase and this one
avid vs FCP and
The Editblog » Avid vs. FCP also this forum
Final Cut Pro vs. Avid??? - dvcreators.network forums
I guess the AVID vs FCP debate will go on for eons.
The bottom line is work with what you are comfortable with and does a good job for you day in and day out and the most important MAKES YOU MONEY!