Yep, it always surprises me how few people change off the default Computer Modern -- which I find really spindly and ugly -- given that a single \usepackage{...} will give you a beautiful Palatino, for example. I sometimes suspect they're just wanting to hit me in the face with the fact that they're LaTeX users...
Computer modern is a nice font for documents that contain equations. I suspect that it is because of the subtle changes in density. But for normal prose it really doesn't work very well.
Palatino for text is fine, but what math fonts go well with it? I think them main reason I use Computer Modern is that the math and text fonts look so good together.
