I was really pleasantly surprised with LAStools. It's mostly closed source, Windows only, and the free version is subtly crippled - but it works really well. G

I was really pleasantly surprised with LAStools. It's mostly closed source, Windows only, and the free version is subtly crippled - but it works really well. Getting it running under Wine was dead-simple. There's a significant community around it, and the author fights for open formats. Checking out PDAL is on my todo list for sure.