The Pioneer VSX-1121-K is also available from Amazon for around $450 right now. Much better feature set than the Denons. It has MCACC instead of Audyssey, though, and I'm honestly not sure how the two compare.
Ken,
You are recommending Pioneer - is that your brand of choice? Do you have a sales pitch prepared? Truth is that I have not looked at receivers in a long time so I don't know what features are supposed to be desirable. I don't really need upscaling. I like the Ipod connection, 90-100 watts per channel (or more), the ability to decode the latest surround codecs and at least 4 HDMI inputs.
