any cheap fender or squier is a "nice" beginer guitar if you refer to someone who never played a gutiar before - for the beginning all that counts is the price, becaus if 3 months leter you feel like "guitar is not realy my cup of tea" then you might be realy pissed when having a brand new $1500 guitar at home.

Other than that i can only say that i am extremely impressed my ibanez. my bandmate has a jackson and it is by FAR not as good as my new Ibanez RG7-420bp. but that can vary even within the series - you will see that if you take two identical giutars that there can be a huge differences - i´ve seen that already - i´ve also seen $3000 guitars that sounded like crap and played horribly and on the other hand some $200 guitars were amazing.

Anyway - the best gutiar i´ve ever layed hands on was a Parker Fly - this instrument beats the others by far - there is nothing compared to the feeling when playing a parker. sadly they are damn expensive.