I've been playing guitar for about 14 years now. I've gone through tons of guitars and currently own 6 guitars and 4 basses. I've tried out loads of different ones and have become fairly picky about guitar choice. When a beginner asks me this question I first ask "How serious are you about playing guitar?", "What's your budget?", and "What sound are you looking for?". First and foremost, let me say this: If you buy a guitar that is of poor quality and sound, your learning will suffer. What I mean is that if you get a guitar that has poor sustain, hardware problems, and just overall doesn't seem to fit you right you'll find that you're just going to get frustrated and will spend too much time dabbling with playability/hardware issues rather than furthering your learning.
If you're serious about playing and your budget allows it, spend a little more on your first guitar. You'll be thankful later. I'm not saying go out and spend a grand on your first guitar, but around 400-600 bucks can get you a decent guitar if you're careful. In my personal experience, anything under $300 is junk. Don't go that route unless you plan on spending more money to upgrade pickups and hardware.
You seem to be leaning towards Ibanez. Ibanez makes some fairly good quality guitars. Like previously mentioned, stay away from guitars with a floating tremelo, like a Floyd Rose. It's not worth the hassle. As a beginner you're not going to want to spend all you're time tuning and setting up your guitar instead of learning. Get something with either a fixed bridge or a strat-style tremelo. Tuning is WAY EASIER and faster and it will allow you to get into different tunings on the fly.
Although your amp/effects probably have more of an impact on your tone, the guitar, specifically the type/brand of pickups it has makes a world of difference. Basically, you have two different types of pickups, humbucker and single coil. Humbuckers (the wider ones that look like two single coils joined together) give you a powerful, fat tone. These are what you use for thick distortion. Single coils give you a clear, clean, glassy tone which is quite good for clean styles. I recommend getting a guitar that has a humbucker in the bridge position and a single coil in the neck or even better a dual humbucker equipped guitar which has splitting capabilities. Then you can have a humbucker tone or a single coil tone at the flick of the switch. To sum it all up, a stock Fender strat isn't going to sound good for metal just like a Jackson RR1 isn't going to give you a good blues or overall good clean tone. That's not what they're made for. They can be upgraded by changing the pickups to handle different musical styles but don't expect certain guitars to sound good for all styles of music straight out of the guitar store.
Here are some of my personal faves for under 600 bucks. Carvin- you can't go wrong here. 1000+ dollar guitar for under 600. You can order one already in stock or have one custom made. Fender- good quality, great resale. ESP- great quality.
Also, Schecter, Hamer, and Fernandes make some good quality guitars for low bucks. The new Parker P-38 would be a great choice. That new Prs Santana is quite nice as well.
Here are some I'd stay away from. Epiphone- almost every non-jazz style Epiphone I've played is complete shit. Junk pickups, hardware, frets, etc. To top it all off they charge too much for this junk! I've also never played a cheap model Jackson or B.C. Rich that I was happy with. USA made Jacksons and B.C. Rich guitars rule though.
The main thing is just get a guitar that "feels" right to you and that doesn't have any major quality issues. Then later on you can upgrade the hardware and pickups. Putting in good pickups(which basically no cheap guitar comes with) makes a world of difference in terms of tone and playability. Good pickups can make a guitar seem to play much easier, mainly because of the output and sustain.
I'd recommend spending some time at
www.harmonycentral.com They have tons of user reviews on practically any guitar you can think of as well as faq's and other articles. There is a mountain of useful information there that has steered me in the right direction more than once before.
Anyway, cheers to you. Good luck and enjoy learning the guitar!