cisco pix, linux firewalls, freebsd firewalls - that's what we use.
we are not filtering the traffic for our "home" clients but we can do it for the "enterprise" ones however it's not my area of operations.
as for the firewalls for the offices, as long as you know what you are doing, iptables can do everything oyu need, it's more then cheap - it's free

i say that iptables are enought to protect home and small business offices. you can read the logs as an admin and build your own or use avaliable scripts to look for the attack attempts if you don't like to read the logs yourself.... also people do live with so called "presonal firewalls" long years without being compromised. Of course you still need to know what to do, bur some "freeware" firewalls i've seen can filter out every traffic you need, so you only have to know how to use it.
Of course i'd never reccomewnd it as anything more then a firewall that's protecting a home PC.