Here are my thoughts after living with a CNC machine and no table saw for 2 years:

1) The bandsaw IS an excellent replacement for a table saw if you're not dealing with lots of sheet goods or making lots of cabinets and square things like that. For furniture work (or guitar work, as I'm doing), these initial cuts are not intended to give the final finish, and it works out very well.

2) The bandsaw is NOT a great replacement for a table saw if you have to make lots of jigs. Jigs really require very straight edges, if only to have a reference edge. There are lots of fiddly little parts that go along with making jigs. These also have to be pretty square and accurate. The table saw is simply more convenient and more accurate for this kind of work.

3) *IF* you're a busy shop, and you can deal with spending a lot of time on the CNC, OR if you're a not so busy shop doing simple things such as signs, a CNC machine can be an excellent addition to the shop. It's not a great tablesaw replacement if you're making lots of one off jigs and things like that. The CAD work is easy...running the machine is easy. That's not the problem. Work holding is the problem. I found myself spending more time making jigs who's only purpose is to hold the parts to make my other jigs. If I was doing a production run, it's not a big deal, but I don't do huge production runs. The process of making the work-holding fixtures can get so time consuming and wasteful that it completely dwarfed the process of actually building things.4

4) Work holding fixtures are a pain

5) Work Holding fixtures are a pain

6) Time time time time...large CHUNKS of time. It's not a big deal if you can get a solid 5 hours to get a task done. As it it, especially with the new twins, I have no such luxury. I'm assuming that a lot of hobbyists, and pros like me, are in the same boat. There is limited, sporadic, shop time because you have to do other things. In my case, I'm a one man show so I have to do all of the business side of things, customer service, taking care of the kids, and family. CNC is simply a bad solution if you need to be able to work in 15 or 30 minute chunks. In order to be effective, I need to be able to get something done in short bursts, and CNC works in the complete opposite way. To be effective with CNC, you need to be able to do a task from start to finish. This one thing, more than anything else, has made CNC very difficult to deal with. It's something that's never talked about, but I think this is the killer for the small shop or hobbyist. Again, not a big deal if you're just doing things like signs and simple things like that. They require very little interaction. If you're doing complex things where you need to re-fixture things multiple times, change bits, do tool touch-offs and things like that, your choices are very limited. Either you do very complex fixturing and indexing, or you dedicate a large chunk of time to see your processing through to completion.

I'm in the process of selling off the CNC and bringing a table saw back into the shop. While it makes some things more difficult, and requires an awful lot more hand work, the fact is that I can actually accomplish my tasks a few minutes at a time. In theory, the CNC would blow me away in terms of productivity, but if it sits unused because I can't get my large chunks of time lined up, then as a practical matter hand work is far and away the winner.

Anyhow, these are my thoughts.