Recently, I came from T-Mobile and the Mytouch 4G to Verizon. I got the Droid Charge, and I'm exchanging it for the Motorola Droid 3. Here's why:
BATTERY HOG
The Droid Charge is a major battery hog, probably about as bad as the Thunderbolt.
Being 4G (actually LTE), it uses a lot of battery. But even on Wifi or 3G (CDMA), it still uses a lot of battery. An application such as 2X battery saver helped somewhat, but that only helps when the phone is not in use.
The biggest battery muncher is the screen. Without question, the Charge has a big, beautiful display. But that display also drains the battery quickly, even when it's dialed down to 25%. After an hour of playing a non-intensive game (Yahtz Me), the battery went down from 100 to 77, meaning (to me) that it's not going to make it through the day if you're using the phone constantly to text, surf, watch video, etc. There are solutions for this: carry a charger, buy an extra battery, get an extended-life battery, etc. If you get the Charge and use your phone a lot away from home, I highly recommend having a charger handy and/or getting extra battery power.
LAGGY SCREENS:
There is noticeable lag when navigating the screens and even when sweeping fro one screen to another. This happened in its native TouchWiz state, AFTER I got rid of all of the widgets, although removing the many built-in widgets helped. Switching to the Go Launcher EX also helped somewhat, as did turning off extra features such as animations, but there was still lag.
Another problem is in trying to create a shortcut. This invariably involves a 5-15 second delay while the available application list opens up. This happened with the native launcher and with the Go Launcher, although it was a bit better with the latter.
BLOATWARE:
Verizon loads its phones up with Garbage-Ware. I'm told that the Droid 3, while it does have Bloatware, doesn't have as much.
SCREEN DISPLAY BUG:
The Charge has a proximity sensor that is supposed to automatically adjust the brightness level, based on the light settings (for example, the screen is supposed to dim when the phone is placed to your ear). While this sounds good in theory, it doesn't work in practice. If you're on the call screen, expect to hit the power button every few seconds to turn the screen back on , because the phone keeps turning the screen off after a couple of seconds. This can be annoying if you're trying to use the phone's number pad to navigate menus with the automated voice on the other end of the line.
The display bug isn't confined to call screens. When using some applications, the screen will dim for a couple of seconds, light back up for a few seconds, dim again, and sometimes go dark. In addition to being annoying, I would imagine that this isn't good for the battery life. While this can be avoided by going into Display Settings and unchecking "Power Saving Mode" (doing this does NOT stop the previous bug), it rather defeats the purpose of having a Power Saving mode.
FROYO: When I first turned on the phone, it asked to update. It updated to a newer version of Froyo. Days later, my phone is still running Froyo. I don't know if Gingerbread has been pushed out yet, and it might help the battery issue, but I prefer to have the latest system when possible, and I'm not into rooting my phone.
In my opinion, the Charge needs some work before it's ready for prime time. If you do get a Charge I recommend turning off the Power Saving mode (since it probably does little to save power) and having more battery power and/or a charger nearby.
As far as the Droid 3 goes, I'm not all that fond of Motorola's BLUR interface (although I'm told that this phone has a less-intrusive version). It's also supposed to have a bit less bloatware. Motorola is known for its good call reception (antenna), and as Medion said, a differnet launcher can be used to get rid of some of the BLUR features. Of course, it doesn't have 4G/LTE, but I can live with Verizon's 3G/CDMA network. Also, the Droid 3 comes with Gingerbread. The downside is, of course, that Motorola is notoriously slow in updating the Android O/S, so users may be stuck with Gingerbread for some time.
That's my opinion, and yours may vary.