Who else is using it. I LOVE IT as both a blog and regular website platform.

who else?

I have not spent too much time with wordpress. I used it for a little while, but it didn't suite any of my websites needs how I wanted it to. However, as far as blogging software goes, I am thinking that wordpress is your best choice.

One thing I never messed around with too much is the theming portion of wordpress. How easy is it to create your own templates/themes?

the new wordpress is now being used by many companies for full websites. the backend admin panel makes adding pages and adjusting the code of templates very easy. it is really the best I have ever seen to date.

It is incredible and I would recommend it to any/every one

I will take a look at it, when I tried it it was several versions ago and it didn't fit my needs, but maybe now days it will.

This Wordpress stuff can look pretty damn nice! I have to check it out more as part of the never-ending education regarding forum options and software.

I have found that there is nothing better and have now had 2 friends, who work full time at very respected web design companies (one in NYC and the other in NC) - tell me that even they have custom designed full sites for paid customers on the wordpress platform because the back end administration built into it is so user friendly. You can instantly add new pages right into the skeleton of your site theme. It is really amazing, and you always have the option to turn on the comments feature making every/any page basically a feedback blog like section. very cool

Yes the ability to allow pages to have comments is very nice.

I have been experimenting with some CMS things for another large portion of this website (that is currently under construction), but have not had too much luck integrating them with the forums.

So now just for figuring out how to integrate wordpress with my forums.....

that is easy - just start a wordpress site and have a forums link that opens up these forums. For example look at my blog (political Disgust) - once there look at the Advertise or About navigation links. For you those could be "Forums" for example.
I will show you a great example - take a look at this site - http://www.nightly.net/ - completely custom done in wordpress. looks like a regular website, yet all wordpress EXCEPT the forums. If you click on forums in the upper left it takes you to their forums (with 1.6 million posts!)

Yes, but what I would like is to have it so you can have the same login (username and password) for forums and for making comments and such, as well as if you login on the forums, you are logged in on the wordpress part of the site, and so on. That is not all that easy to do with a lot of software is the problem.