It all depends on budget. You buy what you can afford, but I'd spend the most I could on a good mill or lathe. I got a Harbor Freight X3 mill and I love it, but it is taking work to keep it tight and accurate. One good example of this is that I had to grind all the gibs so that they made more surface contact and kept the tables from wobbling on their screws. Also the main spindle wobbles by around .0005" at the tool and at the spindle (so it's not a collet problem). After discussing this with Chris at LMS and some other people the general consensus is "well yeah, that sounds about right for a cheaper little mill". It's plenty accurate for me but those are some things to consider.
I will say that I like the Taiwanese made tools a bit better as long as they are not the round column type, and as long as they are not the Chinese knock offs of the Taiwanese tool. If you have around $2k I love the rong fu rf-45 as a "almost as big as a knee mill" mill. If you have less than that wait around for a HF sale and a cupon so you can get their tools for very cheap (My X3 which Grizz sells for $1150 I got for $600). If I didn't get such a discount the HF version would have been $999.99, and in that case in hindsight I'd certainly spend the extra $150 to get the Grizz version, fit finish and support are just better. If you are looking for the $500 range the little machine shop High Torque Mini Mill is quite nice. In fact I don't really use the size of the X3 that much, and the DC brush-less is a fantastic upgrade to this little mill so if I had to choose what's on the shelves today with no discounts I'd buy that mill without a question.
One thing I've noticed is that most of the small mills expect you to use the spindle for the Z travel, I've never done this on my X3 except for drilling. I'd much rather keep the rigidity up by moving the whole mill head and then locking it down. This has proved useful for some projects where I've wanted to use stainless but if you are spending most of your time in softer materials (including 1018 steel) then using the spindle should be just fine.
