well yes and no, all of redhat's rpms have crazy dependencies (try installing any newish rpm on a 6.2 box.. nope? then try the src.rpm, and then you see you have to upgrade 30 more rpms to satisfy dependencies)..
but just the format itself I think is a really good one. the religious debate about rpm vs dpkg is a hot one, but the real difference is this: rpms do not do configurations in the package for the most part, whereas dpkgs a lot of the time have you interactively do configuration after the package installation. this is both good and bad, but when you're trying to roll out a new apache package to 30+ boxes, you probably do your config mgmt elsewhere anyway. and that difference is on purpose, because of the ideals of the two groups who designed rpm and dpkg. I prefer rpm.
but the foremost reason I chose rpm for my own projects over dpkg is its cross-platform functionality. you can have src.rpms which can be built on multiple platforms and architectures with no problems (now of course, most that I have seen have problems because that functionality is still rather immature, and the packagers tend not to do it right in any case).
well let me close saying that I've really not had too much exposure to dpkgs since I was running slink on my alpha about 2 years ago. but I managed to get a system up and running which would make equivalent a redhat intel box and a sparc solaris box as far as package mgmt went, and then I could install multi-arch/os rpms built from the same src rpm. very nice..
you should check out this project, quite cool, and that set of rpms doesn't have the crazy dependencies that the redhat built rpms do:
http://www.fastcoder.net/~thumper/software/sysadmin/snapdragon/
rpm distributions for solaris 2.6, 2.7, and slackware 7.1. if I ever get the time, I'd love to extend platform support to solaris 8 and darwin. maybe digital unix too if I can free up one of my alphas to run DU. shouldn't be too difficult.
cheers,
-o