What you get is a very intuitive program. One that offers the ease and freedom of both pre-made menus and easy fabrication of your own menus.
Encore also offers a much better encoder than LE. Encore will also take your fused AVI movies directly into Encore, no need to convert to MPG2 before hand.
Encore will let you set cahpter markers without menu items. It will also let you set a play all without having 2 copies burned to disk. It will also let you have a chapters menu with return to the menu after each chapter, but a play to the next, depending on where the clip was selected (chapter list vs play all).
It is basically a very user friendly application. Creating a looping DVD is soooo easy, just set the end action to return to the start. In Liquid this can be done, but it is a workaround.
Encore will also create projects in 4:3 and 16:9 with no problems (at least none that I have encountered) It also supports multiple burners, although I usually create a disk image and burn through Nero.
These are just a few highlights, but they are some of the reasons that this has become my application of choice for all of my DVD authoring needs.
That said, Liquid does a decent job for very simple stuff.
Mark Harvey