If you want to buy an SSD at the moment, the choice is actually very easy: buy a Kingston SSDNow V+100 96 GB. Or more than one and put them in RAID 0 if you need the space. And if you want a single, large one for a laptop, a Crucial M4 is your best bet.
Some explaining:
The new Sandforce controllers are fast on paper, but REALLY unreliable. And anything from OCZ might look fast on paper as well, but there is a massive amount of complaints about them. The new Vertex is the worst of the bunch. On tweakers.net, there are even emails with OCZ where they acknowledge that.
Intel is fine (and often fastest in benchmarks), but pretty expensive. And, as said, those benchmark numbers don't say much when it comes to SSDs: they tend to miss the point as they only look at sustained throughput and IO-ops. Interesting if you have a server and require every last bit of performance 24/7, but not for home use.
For home use, you want reliability and a low price. And, if you want to do RAID, an aggressive garbage collector. Which brings us to the Kingston V+100 SSDNow.
You will experience it as just as blazingly fast in daily use as any other SSD, and you get a lot of bang for your buck. It has by far the best GB/$ ratio of all the available SSDs. And an aggressive garbage collection, which makes it very good for RAID.
It's a bit older tech (it actually uses a heavily redesigned JMicron controller, the same one that made some older SSDs look bad), but with the new firmware from Toshiba, it's actually a pretty decent SSD, without any bad marks.
Oh, and did I mention it's really cheap?
You can buy the upgrade bundle kit for about $10 extra, which includes a 3.5" bracket, cables, an USB casing and Acronis HD cloning software.
If you want a bigger one for your laptop, the Crucial M4 is the best choice. Reasonably cheap, very reliable and available in sizes up to 512GB.
And if you really want a Best Brand one, Intel is good, but they use the same controller as the Crucial M4 one, which is cheaper. I would get that one instead and save the difference.
Interesting enough, the Intel ones use Flash with the least amount of erase cycles: only 3000 of them for each cell! So they will stand the least amount of heavy usage.