Question about Entourage vs. ical, mail, and Address Book

I am switching from Windows XP to a new MacBook Pro this week. I am a heavy Office user so will be getting Office 2004 for Mac.
My concern is since I use Outlook so heavily should I use Entourage on the Mac or go with iCal, Address Book, and Mail. I like that Entourage is so heavily integrated with Office but as well why I like iCal, Address Book, and Mail is that they work with .mac and isync. I have seen about a program called e2Sync which I think would help me use both but as well I see no reason to use both if one does the job.
For users out there using the mac programs, do you find they work as well or better than Entourage or Outlook did?
Also, I would have to convert my data from Outlook 2003. I have heard there are 3rd party programs that convert to Entourage (just not from Entourage to Outlook) but are there any that convert from Outlook 2003 to iCal, Address Book, and Mail?

I use Mail and Address Book, not iCal don't really have much use for it. I used Outlook before but I don't know I just find Mail and Address Book a bit more simpler and straight forward not that Outlook was complex.

Just Mail does the job.

Former XP user, heavy, heavy Office user -- extensive use of Outlook in XP. I'm using Entourage now just because it's as close as MS comes to Outlook for Mac. It will sync using .Mac, but it does so by going from Entourage --> Address Book/iCal/Mail ---> .Mac ---->Address Book/iCal/Mail (2nd machine) ---> Entourage (2nd machine).

It works, and does so in the background, but it's obviously a bit ham-fisted. I think it's just more convenient to have address, email, calendar, etc all in one place on one screen. Entourage does not have all the features of Outlook, however, but has most of the basic ones.

I didn't realize it does that type of syncing to .mac, etc. I found www.e2sync.com so assumed that this is not a standard mac feature that's built into OS X. is this something you have to set up so that entourage links with the other programs (ical, etc)?

I started with entourage then went to mail, ical, and address book, because it seemed like thats what I a 'Mac Guy' would do.

Anyway, I am back with entourage. Its no Outlook, but it does 95% of what I used in Outlook. My biggest complaint is that in the calendar view you can only see one whole month and not part of two. So today is Oct 28 and I am still on october and seeing what i did on Oct 1. Unlike outlook which will show me the last week of Oct and the first few of Nov.

In address book I don't know of a way to get the biz card view, in notes everything seems to be viewable as a list rather than the post-it style view.

One thing I've wondered is why they simply don't have Outlook for Mac as part of the Office suite. I know a new version is coming out next year but once again, it'll be Entourage but maybe they are making some good changes. One thing I use in Outlook a lot along with the other features is the tasks for task lists. Does Entourage have this or along with ical, etc. do any of those do tasks or does another program do tasks?