Personally, I don't like Helvetica except in logos that start with A. (American Airlines and American Apparel have good Helvetica logos. Outside of that, though, it doesn't excite me.)
Quite. Microsoft did the world a great favour - flaws and all. Arial is The People's font, and one of these days someone cool and respected may even make a film about her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web#Program_...
The fonts are technically not "free" anymore.
I find this an intriguing proposition, considering that Helvetica was born out of the modernist movement and it’s democratic ideals whilst Arial was the commission of Microsoft, the personification of capitalism. Pretty sure there’s a liberal arts essay in the making right there.
In that case you might fall in love with the logo of Finland's leading tech/economics/design college, Aalto University:
"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them."