When the Hoya buyout was first announced, there was a lot of panic, and speculation that they only wanted the medical equipment division and were going to dump the camera business. A year later, though, it looks like the sky is not falling after all — apparently extra development resources from Hoya allowed them to beef up the K20D's specs, and the changes at Pentax USA (Ned Bunnell as CEO) look really positive. Not the kind of things one would expect from a parent company looking to gut an acquisition.
On the other hand, I do think they're trying to drive the profit margins up a bit. The K20D and K200D are still good deals, but priced a bit higher than their predecessors — and the once-constant rebate program is scaled down and now available to full-time students and photography teachers only.
The other factor is Samsung, who makes the K20D's sensor and rebadges Pentax's cameras and lenses as their own line. They're rumored to be working on K-mount bodies which differ further from Pentax too, expanding the body options in the system. Samsung has annual revenues exceeding those of Nikon, Canon, Olympus, and Sony combined, so it'd be a mistake to ignore them.
With all respect to Major_Small, I think Pentax is a great system for a specific hobby (photography), not just a "general" one (whatever that means, but I assume the connotation is "not serious"). And I know for certain that it's used by many artists and workaday professionals as well.
Canon and Nikon certainly are the safe bets and you can't go far wrong going with the mainstream ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), but (since you're asking in the Pentax forum) I think Pentax offers a compelling package of quality and value that will be around for a good long time, and it's silly to cut them (or Olympus, the other system which I think has some interesting stuff going on) out of the picture without a good look first.
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