This could be a very informative section. I look forward to contributing and learning from the experiences of others.
Particulary for beginners with speech experimentation, if you can start out successfully with the right equipment then it is more likely your experience will be long and positive.
More advanced users may come at the issue from the point of view that "I want to pick up any kind of hardware and use it despite its shortcomings, that is what is out there in the real world."
On the other hand, if you use your hardware a lot then you want something that is durable and reliable. It is not a pleasant experience to put time into creating a model and then have the hardware fail when you need to use it. Once I find a good combination I will probably buy up a crateload of them to ensure I have plenty of backups.
There are other fora where the relative merits of hardware are discussed, but they rarely look at the hardware in sufficient detail relevant to speech experimentation.
It is also very important to discuss the hardware in the context of the entire train, not just one component, as Robin has suggested above.
Personally I have used 8 different devices for speech input and have found them all very odd in one way or another.

Let me dismiss the 3 worst here: all my comments are based on an IBM NetVista using motherboard sound and USB 1 with Linux operating system, ALSA and Pulseaudio.
1. Karaoke type generic microphone plugs into the motherboard. Horrible DC offset in Audacity, it is usable but hard to listen to the result. Unplugged it and never used it again.
2. A desktop boom mike that shipped with a Creative AWE many years ago does not seem to work any more. Unreliable.
3. Labtec C-322 is a headset with a noise cancelling mike. This worked well for a while but could not stand up to the usage. The headband is not large enough for my skull and so the earpieces are only close to my ears, not over them. The foam earpadding for the earpieces wore off quite quickly - guys with prickly sideburns should watch for wear here - and the earpieces stopped working when the wiring failed at the plug end despite very careful handling. I will be using an adapter between the plugs and the actual headset with this type of setup in the future. That way all the mechanical load is on the adapter and not the plug, and the adapter is inexpensively replaceable. I put a lot of work into experiments with this headset, most of this is history now since I am not using that headset any more. Longevity is important. It is a pity about this headset, I managed quite a few successful 100% recognition models and still haul it out on occasion when a wired solution is good and I can spend time fixing it up when the earphones go sour.

Just my 2 cents on these, more positive comments with others to come.