[markw10]

My Airport Extreme Base station just gave out this week so I need to replace it. I had the first version of the Gigabit models and I know there's a newer version out but I am also looking heavily at the Linksys E3000.
I know the E3000 is cheaper but that is not the deciding factor. I want the parental controls that the E3000 has and it seems like the AEBS doesn't have parental controls.
I have always tried to buy Apple products though and I want to know, am I giving up any features by going to the E3000 instead of staying with the Apple model? It seems when it comes to the actual hardware they are very similar. When I looked at the Airport Utility I noticed there is a section to set it up with MobileMe and when I did research on Google I found an article from 2008 from Apple stating that in order to use Back to My Mac an AEBS is required. Is this still the case or does it just need a certain protocol that is now available in other routers such as the E3000? Are there any other possible features that I give up by not getting an AEBS?
I haven't really had much luck getting Back to My mac working reliably with even the AEBS but it's a feature I want to use more in the future so don't want to give this up.
Thank you for your help.

[Waragainstsleep]

I've never found an extender system that works half as well or robustly as Apples Airport Extreme & Express boxes. Perhaps that doesn't matter to you though. You can also add a Time Machine backup disk to an AEBS.

[Spheric Harlot]

Back to my Mac doesn't require an AEx.

The Thunderbolt macs get 450 MBit wifi with current AEx Base Stations.

[Wiskedjak]

I don't see any reason to spend the cash on a Airport base station. Even if you need an extender system, most of the advantage is in the Express base station (I've got a D-Link router with 2 Express base stations as extenders from it).

Even for Time Machine backup, there are many 3rd party products that will also be recognized as Time Machines.

[Cold Warrior]

I've used a lot of different WAPs over the years, including recently, and IMHO the AP Extreme is the best consumer one out there. By comparison the rest have buggy, clunky interfaces, and worse reliability. YMMV.

[Waragainstsleep]

While other units do support WDS, they don't seem to do it very well. On the rare occasions you can get them to work at all, they could fail irrevocably at any time. Airport comes back up pretty much every time without issue. At worse a reset is required.

[Doc HM]

What Waragainstsleep said. Plus the antenna in the AEBS are pretty good. Better than almost everything else I have tried.