Tom,
The recommendation of a Bridgeport machine is appreciated and has been made several times in the thread.
I have a 1983 Bridgeport 2hp Series 1 with variable speed, x-axis feed, and DRO. It's a great machine, no doubt about it.
BUT...it's a big thing for a homeowner to find room for as it's footprint is some 6' x 8'. Mine weighed in at 2200 lbs without the table feed or DRO attached. I bought it from Detroit and at the time it was $500. to get to a depot where I put it on my trailer, or the shipper did with a crane, and I had to give another $100. for that. I'm sure the shipping prices are much higher now as that was in 2001. Once home it took a great deal of straining my 8 ton cherrypicker to just get it on the ground. My wife and I then used pipe rollers to inch it into my shop and into it's current location. Thank goodness for the level cement driveway and shop floor! For someone who does not have a truck and trailer the cost of getting a machine this size home from the local shipping terminal and into location can easily be $1000. or more if people are hired to do the job.
Lots of folks simply don't have the room for a mill the size of a Bridgeport in the first place.
Parts for the Bridgeport are not easy to find now that the machine is no longer a mainstay in industrial use, and they are very expensive. I bought a good machine and have had no real problems with it, but other people in machining forums have had less luck with theirs bought in this time of low priced manual machine tools. Those low prices are for machines that have been depreciated out in professional use where they may have run for twenty years day in and day out. They're tired machines for the most part. When they break down, as they ultimately must, it's no small thing to repair them. It takes room around the machine, and above it, to remove the head with a crane, for example. Try that alongside your wife's Taurus out in the garage.
On the other hand, these small machines can be handled by most anyone with a friend willing to drop by for a few minutes of lifting and a beer. The machines can be completely disassembled on a large kitchen table, and parts for the little Chinese tools are very easy to find and are quite inexpensive, especially when compared to Bridgeport parts. Whole businesses have arisen around supplying the needs of home shop or hobby machinists now and it's really an active enthusiastic bunch of people doing it. There's a guy in Pasedena, CA who has just about any part for any of these little machines in stock ready to ship:
http://www.littlemachineshop.com/.
Another factor that's very important to mention is that just about all of the small machines plug into the wall - run fine on household 110 current. Any machine surplused out of industrial or small shop use will run on 3 phase 220 volt at least. Not everyone even has single phase 220 wired in but for those who do the problem of phase conversion becomes a big issue. There are several ways to deal with it and none of them are free.
For better or worse, the small Chinese maching tools have opened up the world of hobby machining to people who for one reason or another could never consider such a thing in the past. Sure, I remember drooling over catalog ads for Smithy machines but I could never afford one. I'm not old enough to have been able to buy any of the Atlas/Craftsman tools out of the Sears catalog but I'm old enough to have looked at them and one of my uncles had a full miniature shop in the 1950's with which he made prototypes of a bunch of gizmos that he was able to patent and sell to manufacturers.
So yeah, it's standard advise given in forums all over the net when the subject comes up - "Buy a Bridgeport", inevitably. I've never seen anyone giving that advise ask first whether the recipient has room for one, has the ability or desire to deal with a fun tool that's as heavy as a car, can power it up, or whether the person has any prior experience in machining to keep such a machine from being anything other than a strange and awesome monstrosity.
Nope, it's just "Buy a Bridgeport", nothing else will do.