There’s a new Canon Rebel out that is pretty fantastic. It’s a bit out of your price range but it also does HD video, if that might sway you. It’s a good $1000 less than any other body that Canon has that does similar stuff.
You can’t really compare the numbers on your Kodak, because different sensor sizes cause the perspective to be different when compared to focal length.
Tamron makes some great lenses that are a lot cheaper than Canon or Nikon, as does Tokina. I highly recommend looking at them.
Think of a dSLR system as a work in progress. Buy something to start, and then add lenses as you find yourself hitting the limits of what you have. Keep in mind that you can get adapters, too, for old manual focus lenses that can be picked up really cheaply. I have adapters for my Canon EOS bodies that let me use old Pentax screwmount, and also Yashica/Contax mounts. With that, I have shopped around and found things like old primes for as little as $5 in pawn shops or used camera stores that produce great results. That is one way you can get into telephoto for landscapes, for instance, relatively cheaply.
There are a lot of lower-value/quality lenses that are less expensive, but the image quality they give is really not worth the savings. Lots of lenses are designed for people who aren’t all that exacting about their work and don’t want to ever have to switch the lens off the camera. Sites like photo.net are full of nit-picking discussions of lens quality that can be a whole fetish unto itself, but you can also find a lot of good information there about what lenses are the winners and which ones to avoid. Look also at used shops like KEH.com or watch craigslist for people offloading things.
