Despite their slimy personna, their one saving grace is that when I am setting anything up that requires a DNS configuration (example: Heroku-hosted site), there is ALWAYS a Godaddy-specific tutorial available to help me get through it. For that reason alone, I bailed on Namecheap (et. al) and embraced Godaddy as a registrar.
Now, because the brand is so horribly raunchy, I rarely mention this to anyone... as it embarasses me personally.
Not to mention how everything is plastered with upsells that are worthless to me. GoDaddy goes out of its way to make what you're trying to do harder. This is why I don't like GoDaddy.
Edit: I use Dreamhost for my domains. It may be a mediocre shared hosting solution but the domain registering and managing experience is fast, clean, market-priced, and they provide free whois anonymizing.
Yeah. And I won't be moving from name.com anytime soon.
I also don't see how the DNS thing is an issue. Some setup guide or tutorial says "Add an CNAME for your subdomain pointing to example.com" and it's pretty clear no matter what DNS hosting you're using.
Websites usually have tutorials specifically tailored for GoDaddy.
Also, whenever I call their customer support, they've always been friendly and helpful.
Man, my karma is already negative. It's gonna plummet now...
=]
My biggest issue with GoDaddy has been their effing upsell process when you try to buy or renew a domain. I find it slimy how they try to stick you with all these damn add ons when you just want to purchase or renew a domain you have to go through about 3 screens of upsells with huge "Buy Me / Next" buttons and one tiny "no thanks" link at the bottom of a massive page. I would never recommend anyone to use GoDaddy because of this because there's a pretty large chance of them getting stuck with some stupid add-on they didn't need.
I'll keep my existing domains there because my understanding is that transferring is a bitch but they're not getting any new domain registrations from me.