What's the best solution for a homebuilt robot arm?

[Chriszuma]

So basically, I want to build a robot arm this summer as a side project. I was looking at a few different microcontroller/servo controller solutions, and I was wondering if anyone has experience with any of these, or can offer some advice.

The first one I was looking at is the Make Controller. It's a fully-featured controller and dev board with 4 servo controllers, and built-in networking and lots of useless stuff like that. It is $150. Link.
Then, there is also the Gumstix platform, which is a linux computer the size of a stick of gum, with different expansion boards. There is one expansion board, the robotstix, which has 6 servo controllers. However, this seems much more complicated to program and configure. It would also run about $150. Platform and Expansion boards.
Parallax makes a cool USB 16-servo controller for $40, which would be fun to play around with but wouldn't be suitable for a standalone robot arm. Link.

There are also a plethora of basic stamp and PIC development platform out there, but I don't want to use a basic stamp because I hate basic, and I can't seem to find a reasonable PIC platform. I'm good at figuring things out like this, so a steep learning curve isn't that much of an issue. What I am primarily concerned with is how much effort each one of these will take to work with, so if anyone has tried them, I'd like some insight.

Thanks.