As for your initial question, it's very hard to rank the products from best to worst even though I am a huge advocate of HTC's products. The best products released by the companies goes like this:
Apple - 3GS (Soon to be 4G, the one coming out in June)
Blackberry - Storm2
HTC - Droid Incredible (Soon to be EVO 4G)
For the specific tasks, HTC takes the prize for surfing the web as well as texting with the EVO 4G's massive display and multitouch gestures as long as a physical keyboard is not a must-have. The BlackBerry is more suited towards heavy duty office work such as sending and receiving many emails. Apple's products easily takes the lead in the category of games and the app store, but Android is closing in fast.