Normally, I hate to give bad reviews since I think most products are disproportionately represented with negative reviews already. On this product, however, I feel that the exact opposite is true.
This review ran longer than I meant it to, so here is a quick overview if you don't want to read it all:
1) Uneven cooking surface (horrible for things like pancakes)
2) Doesn't heat evenly (it is very hot around the outside and cool in the middle)
3) Heats up slowly (probably to make sure the middle is at least a little hot)
4) This is specific to mine, but the grease tray broke in half on the third use when I wasn't even touching it.
Now, on to the details...
We got this griddle about 2 weeks ago to replace the unit that we've used for the last 15 years (although we've really only been using it heavily for the last couple of years). The teflon was coming off the old griddle and the heating unit was starting to go out. When ordering the new griddle, I kind of thought they were probably all the same so I picked one that was reasonably priced and that had reasonably good reviews.
The first thing we did with the new griddle was to warm tortillas - I have to say that went perfectly well; so, if that's what you want it for, this is probably a great buy. After that, things went downhill pretty quickly.
The next morning, I broke out the new griddle to make some pancakes. I noticed that it seemed to take a long time to warm up, but that isn't really that big of a deal to me so I just waited patiently. When I started pouring the pancake mix onto the griddle surface, it immediately became obvious that it wasn't completely flat. The pancakes all ran together into the center of the griddle and came out as long oval shapes that I had to cut apart with the spatula - that was the first really irritating problem. The second problem is that it cooks very unevenly and the stuff in the middle hardly cooks at all while everything around the edges burns. I've never had pancakes that turned out worse.
As one last example of the uneven heating, I also made grilled ham & cheese sandwiches for the kids on this. Each sandwich had a burned line running exactly where it had been sitting over the heating element - it was almost funny, the rest of the sandwich was just fine.
Anyway, we ordered another brand of griddle to replace this one, but I had already thrown the box away so I can't return it - oh well... The new one hasn't come yet, but I'm a bit nervous now that I know that not all griddles are the same.
Edit: I just thought I'd throw in here that the replacement griddle I ended up getting was the Broil King USG-10G. After several days of usage, that griddle works great if you are looking for another alternative to this one.