"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely." -Edward Tufte. (OK, that essay applies just as much to the alternatives as it does to PowerPoint, but the quote was too clever not to use.) To be honest, I've never used presentation software enough to have much to say about it. PowerPoint's obviously a pretty good program, but like many Microsoft products, its dominance owes more to Microsoft buying it from the original developers and then bundling it in Microsoft Office than any uniquely compelling features. There's very little it can do that the "also rans" can't do, and there are more than a few things that the alternatives can do better.
	Apple Keynote represents the current state of the art in this category, with a so-far unmatched combination of ease-of-use features and advanced support for multimedia, including scalable graphics, loads of smoothed fonts, dual displays, etc. It imports and exports all of the file formats you're likely to want. The main down-side is that it's only available for the latest Mac OS X. Other than that, it's priced affordably.
	Astound Presentation is a highly-rated, powerful, and easy-to-use alternative to PowerPoint; two reviewers even suggested using it to supplement PowerPoint, as it can add multimedia effects to imported .PPT files that Microsoft's program can't produce. Among its advanced features are a one-click export to HTML or Dynamic HTML for plug-in-free web presentations.
	Corel Presentations is one of the three major applications included in the standard WordPerfect Office suite (with WP and Quattro). It has all the features you'd expect these days (templates, snazzy backgrounds, dynamic transitions, etc.), plus support for animation and sound within slides. Not only can it import and export PowerPoint files, it can also produce Flash files for publishing on the Web.
	Lotus Freelance Graphics is part of IBM's SmartSuite package (along with 1-2-3, WordPro, Organizer, etc), and although it's a good tool in its own right, the key point is that it handles most presentation tasks (including reading .PPT files and exporting stand-alone executables) well enough to make PowerPoint unecessary for SmartSuite users. And of course it shares a similar interface to it's suite-mates. For Windows and OS/2.
	StarOffice/OpenOffice Impress is a very capable program, with most of the features you'd expect to find in a modern presentation package. It will run on Windows, Linux, or Sun Solaris (with an adaptation for Mac OS X also available) and stores its documents in XML, the fully-open data storage format. It has excellent compatibility with MS Office files. It's available in two flavours: OpenOffice, the free open-source version, and Sun StarOffice, which includes some additional features and corporate support at a fairly low price.
	GoBe Productive is an highly-integrated office software package, by some of the same people who created the legendary Claris/AppleWorks package. Rather than having separate programs for word processing, spreadsheets, graphics, presentation, etc. GoBe Productive is a single program that lets you do all of these things, even in a single document. It was a popular package for BeOS, and is now available for Windows. A trial version is available for download.
	KPresenter is the presentation software included in the free KOffice suite of programs for Unix-like systems running the KDE desktop. It can import PowerPoint files and export HTML pages. Since it's feature set is driven by the needs and interests of its developers (rather than adding them for the sake of adding them) it's a fairly simple product, and doesn't have a very large array of templates and such included, but it's more than adequate for many people's presentation needs, and as an open source project, it's likely to improve dramatically with age.
	Prologue SundayPlus and Saguaro Studios Oratorio are two well-regarded programs designed to assist churches with the use of multimedia technology in their worship services, and are easy for a lay-person (by which I mean "not technical", rather than "not ordained") to work with. However, there's no reason they couldn't be used for secular presentations as well. The dual-screen aspect, showing the presenter a comprehensive control panel and the congregation/audience just the presentation itself, is a nice feature. SundayPlus is more powerful; Oratorio is less expensive. Both programs are available for Mac and Windows. Or you might find something else that meets your presentation needs on this listing of worship-focused presentation programs.
	AppleWorks (previously known as ClarisWorks) is a lower-cost alternative to the more powerful presentation packages. It's an easy-to-use multipurpose program (so you can use it for word processing, spreadsheets, and other things as well, which is one of the reason I consider it an inexpensive option), and graphics are one of its strong suits.
	MagicPoint is a free X11-based presentation tool for Unix-like systems, designed to make simple presentations easy, while making complicated presentations possible. Its presentations are stored in text format, allowing you to create and modify presentation files with your favorite text editor.

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