I have a pretty good setup for recording at home. I do all guitars D.I. through a Mesa Boogie Triaxis (excellent piece of gear), it has a built in "record out" jack for direct to desk recording but I run it through an amp simulator first to give the tone a bit more of an edge.
My set up is pc based as I use a fair few VST's and I'm used to working in the windows environment.
Here's the gear:

Mesa Boogie Triaxis (preamp)
Samson Servo poweramp
Eventide Harmonizer H3000 D/SE (not really necessary for home recording)
Palmer PDI speaker simulator (nice piece of gear, eliminates the need for micing up amps)
M-Audio Delta 1010 soundcard (rack mounted - has 10 1/4 inch in and 10 outs - zero latency - 96khz quality - spdif - great piece of equipment)

This all interfaces with a Dell Optiplex, customised for recording music - 5 GB ram (for powering GigaStudio samples) - 2 x 200GB fast drives - 19" flat screen - and no unecessary software eg office etc.

Software that I actually use is Cubase SX2 (sequencing and arranging -should really upgrade to SX3) - DFH Superior (excellent drum package), WaveLab Pro (for editing), and loads of VST plug-ins (good ones like Storm Drum, MOTU Symphonic Instrument & East West Symphonic Orchestra, Cube, etc).

The whole thing probably cost in the region of about €7,000 but if I was to do it all again and leave out the gear and software that I don't actually use I could probably do it for about €5,000.