I spent some time last week making up a few PCs and NPCs for a one-off game where my players would be facing off against a NPC party in some mystical hoo-ha games in the feywild.
I used the first 'real' release of the DDI character builder and it was pretty slick. They were all 6th level so not terribly complicated to roll up but it was significantly faster than by hand.
Pros:
1. Auto generated everything. The characters sheets and power cards it built included all the bonuses for each weapon/power/feat combo which made it a lot simpler for the less number-crunchy players to handle the new characters on the fly. In several instances I thought a number was incorrectly calculated but found out that I was the one who was wrong.
2. Quick changes. Easy to try out different builds. really made me wish I was a player!
3. Cheap. 5 bucks seems like a steal for all the powers, items, feats, classes, races from all the books published and Dragon and previews etc. Did I mention that 2 of the PCs were PHBII classes and one a FR class? And chose powers and items from dragon articles I have not gotten around to reading yet? I almost feel guilty, almost.
4. Item shopping. This made choosing gear for higher level PCs much, much faster (and I think more balanced). The window even included the guidelines for item selection by level so I did not have to look it up.
Cons:
1. Should have been out when the PHB was released. Nuff said. Software dev sucks like that.
2. I noticed some minor bugs. One feat did not seem to be added into a stat, a power seemed to have filler text instead of the real text etc. Nothing that seemed like a big problem to me.
3. No mac support. I did work around this by printing the characters to PDF files so I could send them out but it would be nicer for my players if they could all use the tools and I could run it native on my laptop.
4. Item/power/character info generated is not in a pretty format. There seems to be the possibility for people to take the output and pull it into their templates so hopefully soon the enworld boffins will have some sweet looking character sheets with the nice auto-generated info on them.
Overall I am very impressed. I have not used any of the 3rd party 3E character builders so I can't compare that. I work in software and playing with this I was struck by the number of points of possible failure with this many race/class/power/item/feat combinations. That it works this well is impressive, even if it is late.