Hello, I come from the world of hobby microcontrollers and I want to foray into FPGAs. A quick web search revealed that the two popular entry-level, low-cost chips/boards are the Xilinx Spartan III and Altera Cyclone II.
Looking at their specs, they look almost identical to me. But hey, what do I know? 
So, what do you guys recommend? I want to use it to learn Verilog, and maybe do a little bit of DSP. I want to put OpenRisc1000 on it too. Both chips seem to do perform equally well for all three tasks.