Much really depends on your needs.
Dedicated videoconferencing equipment is better suited for LARGE conference rooms, where full-motion video is important. The software it uses provides the same types of capabilities as Netmeeting, but usually is more powerful. It's usually overkill for 3 or 4 people on each end. Since videoconferencing solutions tend to be EXPENSIVE, you obviously need to have a LOT of video teleconferences to justify the cost. With this type of solution, you can usually only teleconference with another site using the same equipment.
The bottom line here is that if Netmeeting does everything you need it to do (meets your requirements), dedicated video cconferencing systems are nice (but expensive) toys to play with.
Experience: I provide part-time support to a partner company that installed a dedicated system. By the time they finished installing all the bells and whistles (dual projectors, high end sound system with numerous speakers and mikes), they ended up spending close to $50K. The justification was that as part of their contract with the government, they were to provide high-end video conferencing facilities.
My company on the other hand has been using Netmeeting to tie several offices together weekly for our staff meetings. It does everything we need it to do. Since the focus of the meeting tends to be business development charts, we don't use a camera. We have also found that you get better sound quality if you ditch the mike and use a voice conferencing system (we usually have about 25 people between 3 offices in our meetings). Once you get above about 4 people, it gets old passing the mike around the table
