I looked at both and neither jumped out to me to be head and shoulders a winner. I went with a 7800 because I had a VX-7R already and was happy with it. I also liked the front face of the 7800 better, but this is a personal thing and so on that I would just go to the ham store and fiddle with them for a while. I don't have a laptop nor the cable to program a 7800 and so I do it manually. I don't find it offensive to do so, which I think is a good thing. There is no way in heck I'd try to program VX-7R by hand, for example. I dunno if the Icom is better or worse in that respect, but I have no issues field programming my 7800 to add new stations, modify PL tones, whatever.
