Dell support and customer service used to be great - it's not anymore.
The question is ... is there an alternative worth considering?
I am talking work stations more than servers.
I have had great support from both Lenovo/IBM and HP but I also have to say our Dell support has been very good. I would certainly rate it very highly. I assume it may depend on the country you are in and the level of support on the device. We have a large number of Dell servers and laptops and I can't point to any case where the support has been poor. In fact, in many cases they have gone above and beyond what I would have expected. Laptops have all perils support and servers have 7x24 4 Hour business critical.
For servers, HP. They're less like workstations. Nevertheless, I wouldn't discount Dell for commodity hardware.
If I were setting up for a small business....I'd recommend Macintosh/OS X for the workstations... Spend more up front for hardware, but your support costs will be lower in the long run.
I think it depends on a number of factors, first of which what do you mean by workstation?
Where I work, we use the term workstation to refer to a scientific / CAD / engineering caliber platform, that runs GNU/Linux, or could run Solaris / *BSD.
For those sort of systems I'd personally prefer HP, who still shows a bit of their HP roots (as well as Tandem, Compaq, & DEC). I haven't used or evaluated IBM's systems in a few years now, but I'd likely consider them. I've found the Dell Precision series disappointing in my own experience, with BIOS quirks, poor RAID controllers.
For more "Office Technology" (i.e. running MS Office) computer systems, we tend to consider typical PC suppliers, Dell, HP, and just about anyone else with a can do on-site support and replacement nationally.
For office support issues, I have found Dell "quicker" and generally seem keen to respond , but HP has been better at resolving problems the first time. My mental comparison would be of a young, eager, well dressed Nerd-Herd technician, but not necessarily as experienced from Dell versus a cranky, gruff older tech who may be also slightly socially awkward or aloof, but solid skills from HP in terms of technical support. Sure, Dell delivered a replacement Hard drives in mere hours from placing a service call in a small Canadian city, but they also had 3 or 4 trips to replace a motherboard in a single server due to a safety recall (fire hazard). Yes, motherboard, not power supply.
As far as price, I haven't looked at quotes in a while, but Dell tends to be hard to beat on price alone.
Stay away from Dell because they are nearly completely non-upgradeable unless you are very very careful. HP is probably the same. If I were you I would come up with a standard machine build of your own and build multiple copies of the same machine by hiring a kid to come in a put them together.