Yes, it all depends upon the market and your price point. There's no doubting that all manufacturers have specialties that make them the best for a given price point in a given market.
I'm running a Sony/Bose home cinema kit, and it's frankly the canine's cojones. It cost about £2,000, and to better it, I'd be needing to spend at least £6,000.
As to desktop-PC based stereos, it never ceases to amaze me why you don't see more of them in pubs and the like. Anyway, Creative are making such high-quality sound cards that you could make a very nice, powerful stereo for about £300, if you had an old PC lying about. All you need is a decent sound card and a network card (for broadband users). You could use the existing hard drive, because as long as your MP3 fiels are 192K or better, you're unlikely to notice a loss of sound quality until you spend more on the amp and speakers.
I would suggest a basic build of Windows 2000 with WinAmp and IE6. This would mean that you could play your own music or stream radio stations off the net, for a bit of variety.