Jim I was thinking about buying the J-station originally. It was on sale for $129, but the Genesis 3 price had been cut from $299 - $199. It's only for guitar but I have an older Digitech unit that needed replacing so I chose the Genesis.
I only owned the pod for a brief time but basically it seems like both units do pretty much the same things. The Genesis 3 allows you to choose your amp model ,16 in all, and you have your selection of 14 different cab models. So far I like the Rectified amp - british 4x12 cab setting the best (Sounds like a cranked Mesa- Boogie). You can also have two amps running at the same time. You can blend the two amps together for a unique sound, or you can make it fade back and forth between amps to create a really weird effect.
You can use up to eleven effects at once on the Genesis 3. The effects are the standard reverb, delay, phasor, chorus, pitch effects, wah, flange, pickup selection, and acoustic guitar sim(which is pretty good). All of the effect parameters are adjustable to suit your taste. The wah, and a whammy effect I haven't really been able to use yet because I'll need the separate foot controller for it.
It comes with software that allows you to adjust any parameter with the click of the mouse when you have it hooked to your computer.
One of the best features I've found so far is that you can choose your own eq points so that your tone controls adjust the frequencies that sound best to you. You can also adjust the resonant frequency of your amp cabinet models which can totally change the sound of the cab.
It has an input for a cd player (it works good for jamming along) it has a digital out (haven't used it yet, still learning about that) left and right outputs and headphone outputs. I think you can use all of the outputs simultaneously. So you can be recording the signal from the digital out while running the L / R out's to a mixer or amp while monitoring on headphones.
The Genesis gives you a selection of what kind of input you are going to feed. You can select between direct out for feeding a p.a. or for recording and there are settings for feeding various effects loops from different styles of amplifiers. There is also a way to turn off the cab modeling, and effects to send the signal out dry.
When I hooked it up to my power amp and cabs I had to fiddle with which output setting sounded best over my stuff, I think I will have to set up some different eq settings to make it sound better over my cabs. It sounded good but the sound needed some adjustments. Which leads me to my last point.
The Genesis only has 48 presets and 48 user programmable selections. I'm not sure if you can overwrite the 48 factory settings or not. I know you can change them, but I'm not sure if you can store and save them in the first 48 memory slots. You can save your amps models on your computer and send them back via midi however.
Hope this helps jim.
to buy some strings...well I was actually thinking about a new guitar but they were all crap. How they can justify selling guitars with chunks out of the neck, frets that were improperly installed etc.. for the better part of $1000 is beyond me. Oh anyway I gave up on the guitars and started looking at the amp sims. They had dropped a hundred bucks of the cost of the digitech unit. 
