Rocking a Lombard G3 right now - lovely machine. It copes very well with everything short of Youtube - and I'm hoping a CPU upgrade will help a little with that. Mine's the 14" LCD model, and currently at 333MHz, and either a CPU swap or overclocking will get it to 400MHz. I got it off freecycle (0$) and spent AU$10+80+50 (about US$90) on a DVD-R, 80GB HD and 512MB RAM. If you want to watch DVDs on it, plump the extra few bucks for a 400MHz model - they have an onboard DVD decoder chip - otherwise, like me, you're looking at a logic board transplant later on, or a PCMCIA decoder.
SCSI is definitely handy for interfacing to older Mac drives, older Powerbooks in SCSI Disk Mode, scanners, etc. And onboard USB leaves the (single) Cardbus free for a wireless card, Firewire, USB 2.0, etc.
Although if you can do without SCSI, and want the option of a later G4 upgrade ($200 and up), the Pismo is definitely a step up - 400 or 500MHz CPU, 100MHz bus, better video, onboard Firewire, DVD playback on even the lower model. The 400MHz CPU can be swapped out for the 500MHz module as well.
Yes, them and the iBook G4s had a problem or two :
