As a collection I agree they are excellent, though I am not a big fan of the first two or the fourth book anymore. TBH I think the series actually grew over time in terms of recommended reading age, roughly following the age Harry is in each book, the first two definitely being children's books IMO, with the middle three growing from young to mid-teen fiction, and the last two for older teens and young adults.
I liked the way Harry 'died but didn't die' and the 10 years on epilogue (though found it a little cheesy, and wish it had been cut from the film).
I also agree the wand ownership thing was getting a bit silly at the end with the Dumbledore > Draco/Snape > Harry/Voldemort thing.
If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman, I find it on the whole better written with a really interesting back-story (though if you are very religious it could be a little blasphemous)
In the first book The Northern Lights, (for some reason re-named The Golden Compass for the film even though there are only 2 references to the alethiometer looking a bit like a compass in the book) you follow a girl called Lyra in a world that is still in a form of The Dark Ages, and is a bit steampunky too (major methods of transport being canal boat, train and zeppelin). In this world people all have a dæmon which is seperate from them but is kind of representative of their soul, and takes the form of an animal. You follow Lyra in a trip from her home in Oxford to The North to save her kidnapped friend (or so she thinks).
At the end of The Northern Lights, and then in the first chapter of The Subtle Knife things start moving into other worlds and starts knitting our world into that of Lyra's and what became a kind of hub world... And that's where it gets really good.
The first time I read it I found it a bit of a slow starter (though this could have been because I was 14), but by chapter 8 or 9 I was hooked... and it really just seems to get better and better all through to the final chapters of The Amber Spyglass. It was also the first, and so far one of only two books to make me cry.
