www.kenrockwell.com has good reviews of DSLRs, he shoots mostly Nikon but has recently been shooting with Canons as well.
I have a Nikon D70S and am very happy with it. I haven't heard anything bad about Nikon stock lenses and wouldn't imagine Canon's to be any different. Before you start thinking about new lenses you should have an idea of what you are going to be shooting. Critters require longer lenses, landscapes and people shorter. The longest lens I've used was the Nikon low-end 70-300mm zoom and was very happy with it. Out of hundreds of images I think I saw chromatic aboration a couple of times, it wasn't very fast, but for what I was shooting it was fine. I can't imagine 10x zoom is more than 200mm but I don't know.
Googling around will give a bunch of different photography sites where you can see other peoples work and get tips. I would also recommend a beginners class at either a community college or through a local camera shop.
The D70S is a 6 megapixel camera and I haven't had any problems printing images up to 10"x14" for a 16"x20" frame, so don't be lured by high pixel counts. You can see the stuff I've done at
http://gallery.mac.com/kerowo