Chris, there's no need to pay out over £500 for CS3 as Elements 6 costs about £65 and does everything that most photographers would want. The Gimps is free and is pretty good. A newcomer to photography who wants to take more than snapshots will soon want to move onto Photoshop.
It's interesting what you say about architects not using Autocads. I'm a structural engineer and work from architects' drawing daily. I agree that most architects won't use Autocads, but here's the thing: very few of them know how to use computer aided drawing software correctly. It is generally just seen as a substitute for a pencil, without taking advantage of the various facilitites that it has - sometimes resulting in drawings that take longer than by hand or lead to potentially serious errors.
I think that to get the most from any piece of software (whatever its use) it must be used correctly and fully - there's little point in using it otherwise.
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