Hi Craig,
In my opinion, Archicad is a much more advanced program than Autocad. It is a 3d modeling and rendering program. I can’t understand why Architects think that Autocad a engineer based product, could be better than a program made for Architects. Vectorworks Landmark which is the landscape version of Archicad has it all. It is a 3d modeling program so you don’t need to buy all of the other programs and, it costs less than all of the others. I would also suggest Photoshop.
Here is my hubpage article which will give you a broad view of Many of the softwares available for Architects, Graphic designers and more. http://hubpages.com/hub/Researching-the-Portable-Office