These responses capture the essence of the messages that I received on the topic.  Thanks for all your input.
 
 
"If your looking for big dumb cheap devices to just move data around a big switched network, 3com is your vendor. If you plan on doing
anything fancier than SNMP, best look elsewhere. "
 
 
"I worked with 7700 and 7700Rs, along with the new 3xxx series, and
all I can say summarizes to simple: don't do it. There is Cisco,
Enterasys, Allied Telesyn, but 3COM is just tumbling down.

Line cards for 7700 are seriously limited in functionality, current
Supervisor can't do wire (8Gbit/s FD) duplex on all cards simultaneusly,
and the 7700R marketed "few seconds failover" goes up to 5-6 minutes
which is actually longer than booting the switch from cold dead state.

The BGP sucks, and OSPF sucks even more (it can kill whole switch in
certain situations I can't speak of at the moment).

Same thing is with the routers - 3000 and 5000 suck, the 6000 suck
even more (1 ATM OC3 interface with 30Mbit/s worth of traffic
generates 85% of CPU load on 6080 and router begins to drop traffic..."

--------------------^ This guy went and bought C gear.

 

"Well, they aren’t service provider switches – they are enterprise focused, and have a very iffy SP feature set. They are also Huwei boxes, rebadged. This means they may (or may not) possess stolen intellectual property. "