I agree with Brendan that TechEd is too pricey for my blood. Thanks to INETA, I got to go last year and I had a great time, but it wasn't my dime. Let me share some insight and demistify the TechEd experience.
Lesson 1: There are lots of salespeople at TechEd and, apparently, lots of people keen to collect all the cheesy free things the salespeople are giving away. I don't get it since the salespeople must know the leads they get at TechEd are mostly junk, but it must pay off on some level. Does the company get a viral marketing buzz? Maybe the salespeople are just as happy to be in a sunny and pleasant town for a week?
Lesson 2: There are lots of casual techies there -- project managers or junior developers, ones who don't open a technical book or read weblogs or explore technology on their own time very much. For these folks, the sessions on "what is Sharepoint" and "DataSets vs Custom Objects" are ground breaking and truly new news.
To me, lesson 1 and 2 are NOT worth the $2,000 price tag; especially if you are already up on the latest in technology. Most of the sessions will be review, but there will still be a few great sessions that you should catch like Jeffrey Richter, Eric Gunnerson, and Don Box -- do the math, and even if those 3 guys do 2 sessions each (which they probably don't), thats 6 great talks for $2,000 . . . I can wait for the DVD.
Lesson 3: There is a Secret TechEd that takes place beyond the conference rooms. This is the lunches and after-hours parties, some invite-only, where authors, speakers, and Microsoft big shots talk shop and build relationships. Sometimes it's a group of 2 or 3, other times it's a hotel room overflowing with 50 people. This is the good stuff, the stuff you can't get from reading MSDN or taking a few hours each weekend to play with ASP.Net 2.0. This is fun! I know many tech-ed attendees who never experience this, and I was only on the periphery of this secret TechEd.
The catch is, you can't buy admission to Secret TechEd and you have to be in the right mindset to take advantage of it. Between WeProgram.Net, CodeBetter.com, and some other projects I'm feeling connected enough to save my money and time for other things. For example, I will attend the Devscovery conference in Reston where nearly every session is a ball-buster from the likes of Jeffrey Richter and Johnnie "Flash" Robbins and the price tag is closer to Brendan's $600 threshhold.