I do not know a whole lot about what is available, but I have some general recommendations. First, stay far away from department store telescopes. They usually come with rickity mountings and are over-powered for their aperture size.
Leafing through Astronomy and Sky and Telescope magazines, my eye is drawn to the Dobsonian telescopes made by Meade, Orion and Coulter Optical Company. The 6-inch F/8 Meade Starfinder costs $349 as does a similar version by Orion. There is also an 8-inch F/6 version for $469. Coulter has a slightly slower 8-inch F/7 for $399. If I were buying telescopes as an amature, and didn't want to invest the time to make one, I would go with one of these models and get the largest aperture I could afford.
Warning. If you think you might want to do astrophotography, Dobsonian mountings are not what you should get, but telescopes with 'standard' equatorial mountings of the same telescope size often cost $300 - 500 more. You need to decide if you are only going to use your telescope for optical viewing, or leave open the option of doing photography.