I've been using Sourcery lite, eclipse and openOCD up to this point, but the lite and personal versions don't have hard floating point library support. I'm happy to pay a few hundred, but the Sourcery standard edition (cheapest with floating point) is $1k, which is more than I'd like to pay.
I had a muck around with the GNUARM compiler yesterday, but it got frustrating because the ARM plugin for Eclipse doesn't seem to work properly with it. Basically it seemed to muck up the make files when that compiler was selected.
So its worth it to save time at this stage to spend a "reasonable" amount on something that just works. BTW I'm actually after an academic licence if available, it's for research.