I'm obviously quite biased (I teach scrapbook classes for Epson), but I do love my Epson's! And I owned both a printer and a scanner before I started working for them. Since then, of course, my collection has grown quite a bit.
First you need to decide if you want wide-carriage or not. Is it important to you to be able to print 12x12 layouts, or do you want to just print up to 8.5x11? If you don't need the wide-carriage, you can save yourself a lot of money with a letter-sized printer.
How archival do you want your prints to be? Pigment inks will give you the most longevity - the prints are extremely fade resistant (and practically water-proof), and if printed on our matte scrapbook paper, will last 200 years in your album, or 100 years framed on the wall. The R800 (8.5" wide) is an excellent printer with pigment inks. If you don't care so much about longevity, the dye ink printers produce outstanding prints with a smaller price tag. The R320 (8.5" wide) has a card reader with an LCD screen. The 1280 (13" wide) is a fantastic deal right now - I believe there is a still a $100 rebate, bringing the price down under $200.
As for scanners, we use the 4870 in class, and I do like it. I have the 1670 at home, and it's great too - obviously not quite as great as the 4870...but you can find it for less than $100. What are you going to be scanning? If you are mainly wanting it only for scanning layouts, you don't need a very high resolution (really, the cheapest scanner on the market can scan a layout at 300 dpi). If however you are interested in scanning negatives or slides, you'll need a scanner with a higher resolution. All of the Epson photo scanners have adapters for scanning slides and negative (the light source is built into the lid, as opposed to a separate unit). All of the consumer-level ones also have the color enhancement as well. The 4870 is currently the only one with Digital ICE - if you have a lot of older heritage photos that have been cracked or torn, this will save you a TON of time. I personally have zero heritage photos, so if I were forced to buy a scanner, I wouldn't worry with this feature.
Hopefully that helps some!