/me loves Photoshop very much

Fireworks isn't *designed* to replace photoshop. It's a web graphics program where photoshop is a print graphics program. While photoshop has the upper hand in most areas, Fireworks kicks its tail when it comes to preparing graphics for the web and doing such things as slicing images for rollovers. Also, last time I checked (version 6 of photoshop) Photoshop can't do animation - Fireworks can. Even if Photoshop *could* do animated graphics it would be Adobe's way. Fireworks MX is reasonably close to Flash MX in the way it builds animations (reasonably - there are still a lot of differences). Also, Fireworks in general handles vector graphics better than photoshop - though that might have changed with the new release - historically Photoshop's vector graphic handling has been rudimentary at best since Adobe wants you to buy Illustrator for that purpose.

Fireworks also works seemlessly with Dreamweaver, the best WYSIWYG HTML editor out there, hands down.

I run Fireworks MX, Photoshop 6.0, and Illustrator 9.0 for most of my graphic prep.

Quick postscript to my earlier post - if you're just starting out on graphics use Fireworks. While there are differences between it and photoshop, they aren't anything that you'll be pulling your hair out trying to figure out.

To use an analogy - learning how to drive on a Ford Taurus doesn't make it any harder to drive a Mercedes once you can afford one - yes the bells and whistles are in different spots but the important things (pedals, steering wheel) are in the same place.

Photoshop 7 + CS comes with imageready 7 + CS and imageready does nice animation although unless i'm looking over something - you have to do it frame by frame.

It can do basic motion tweening.