I work for a Telco. so I won't get into brands or preferred carriers because someone may think I'm biased. The only advice I will give you is to not sacrifice coverage just to get a specific model. Missing out on a feature on the hottest new phone is one thing but being totally disconnected from all the features because you are in a poorly service area is another. Nothing is more frustrating.
Also, I'm like you. I want my own personal smartphone but I already carry around a corporate issued Blackberry. One would think that would be great, free phone. However, nothing is free in the corperate level. We are not locked down but without getting too wordy, our data plans are part of departmental our budgets so there is still a perceived cost and our data usage is monitored.
If your IT dept. has things locked down, it is unlikely that they will allow a non authorized app to have direct access to the mail server. The best you could do is turn on an auto-forwarding rule on your laptop and leave it on all the time or set up an auto forwarding rule on your Blackberry, assuming they haven't locked out that option.
There is a reason why RIM has survived, to date, their lack of recent innovation. They were the first to build a large scale, secure tool for email to personal devices and they are well embedded in many corporations for this reason. Will this save them? Who knows? I don't think I would be amiss in saying that they have a lot of work to do.
