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Don't Let Friends Use PowerPoint
Here's a classic anti-PowerPoint rant by Thomas Stewart in Business 2.0: Ban It Now: Friends Don't let Friends Use PowerPoint. It's reasonably funny but it's also dead on in describing how PowerPoint encourages the creation of bad presentations (as well as how awful those presentations can be).
On the other hand, I'd like to offer an example of what's possible: interaction design history in a teeny little nutshell, a talk recently given by Marc Rettig. More often than not, the slides are built around graphics (custom, not clip art). The formatting is just consistent enough to ensure each slide is part of a whole and it never becomes tedious. Most importantly, the layout is supple and lively enough to conform to the content, the content is not boiled down and shoehorned into the layout. It's not so much that friends don't let friends use PowerPoint, it's more like friends don't let friends use PowerPoint the way you're supposed to use PowerPoint.