To many newbies, you are probably still an early adopter to others around you - most people have only (if at all) hear about Bitcoin. So should you buy or should you mine? IMO, buying is better from an effort/profit perspective unless you can get a hold of ASIC miners. Mining is better to support the Bitcoin economy (we need miners). Buying GPUs at this point seems a bit pointless, and FPGAs are hard to come by and are probably unprofitable soon. If you want to do GPU mining (or god forbid, CPU mining), pick another Bitcoin derived currency like LTC.

Another 2 cents from me,

  Kjakman