Let me list down my experiences:

Alcohol 120% & Daemon Tools are good for emulating game protections, and usually most people use it for that purpose. You can create 1:1 copy of the disc image with all protection technique on the image. Good if you're playing original games, but don't want to have your disc damaged by frequent use. Or you could use the No CD/DVD crack.

Nero Burning ROM is the most user-friendly and nice looking burner application ever developed (at least for me). Even you guys said it's bloated etc etc, there's always Lite and Micro version. Just download them and enter your genuine serial number. There you go, a lite and fast burner for less than 50mb.

Ashampoo Burning Studio, to me sucks big time. It can't properly verify my discs after burning. All discs failed to verified when using other burning softwares on the same data, it's a success. Phailed

UltraISO is the best one, light and fast and no hassle burner, ISO editor/mounter. Since Nero 8/9 won't work on Windows7, UltraISO works perfectly as an alternative.

Agree that MagicISO is great but free version can't burn from ISO of more than 300MB.