This is something I've been thinking about recently. I'm very familiar with the full Photoshop (from work) but can't really justify the expense for home use.
From everything I have read, Elements really does seem to be a bit of bargain. It seems all you miss out on is CMYK and 16 bit precision (Anything else of note??).
For home use this is fine. I'd be using it for touching up digital camera pics, doing some graphics for personal web-sites, and just general mucking around (I find it very therapeutic warping and mucking around with photos!).
That's it - I've made my mind up - I'm going to buy it pronto!
And for what it's worth - I've never considered Fireworks a direct comparison with Photoshop. All the vector based stuff in Fireworks makes it more comparable with a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. I could be wrong as I haven't really used FW much (a designer at work swears by it) but I always get the impression you can't really do stuff on a pixel by pixel level if you need to. The actual final image is 'hidden' behind all the vectors if you see what I mean (!!??!).
As for Graphic Converter, whilst I'm sure it's good for what it is (and great that it's cheap) I've never really got on with it and always end up wishing I was using the 'real thing' (i.e. Photoshop).
My 2 cents.