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1. They'll let you check two bags weighing 50 pounds without paying anything extra. Of all the crap the airlines have come up with the past few years to try and find other ways to gouge customers, the checked baggage fee is the one that bothers me the most, especially since I'm far more likely to check something because of the stupid liquid rules. This fact alone is enough to make me go out of my way to fly on Southwest.
2. Their website makes it much easier to pick the flight you want than any other one I've seen. You enter where you're going to be at and where you want to go and they just tell you all the flights they have that day and what the pricing options are. So it's pretty easy to find the best time available to you and whether it's non-stop or not and what your options are. It's made clear to you that if you can adjust your time that you might be able to get a direct flight or maybe it will be cheaper so you can pick the option that's most important to you. Most other websites just give you a bunch of options that may or may not make sense and it's not clear at all what other options might be available.
3. Most of the time you can get a direct flight to where you want to go (note that I cheat on this one by living in Las Vegas, where Southwest is the major carrier).
4. If you want to change your flight because you need to leave early or something like that it only costs you the difference between what your original ticket was and what your new ticket will be. There's no BS where they charge you $75 or $100 just because you are changing your ticket.
5. Their frequent flyer program is simple and easy to use. You travel X times to earn Y credits and they send you a free round trip to pretty much anywhere they fly. You can use it anytime up to a year or so away, you can give it away to someone if you want and they pretty much don't have much in the way of blackout dates or capacity controls like other airlines. Any time I've tried to spend frequent flier miles on another airline it's just been a giant pain in the ass.
As far as airports go, since Southwest usually connects to the west coast anyway, I really prefer to fly into one of the secondary airports in LA like Burbank, Orange County, and Ontario. It is so nice to walk to your rental car instead of the long walk through the terminal and then riding the bus.
With the Delta merger and Continental departure, and changing travel patterns, I now just go for the combination of best fare and schedule. (Connections are a lot more inconvenient for me now.)
Virgin America's service is actually quite good, too, with fairly decent pricing. Again, though, their routes are limited.
LAX is a truly dreadful airport, but it provides the most options for non-stop transcon flights. LGB and SNA (and Burbank) are better airports, but their proximity to residential areas means noise limitations and an earlier close-down. And forget about wide-body aircraft.
The recent alliance changes have the airlines at each others' throats, and a clever consumer can take advantage. Most of the major airlines are running Double Elite Qualifying Mile promotions right now - 2 transcon round-trips will get you really close to bottom-tier elite on most carriers. If you've already got status, many of the legacy carriers are doing status matches to try and attract loyal fliers from other airlines - Continental & Delta in particular are actively trying to poach the other's elites.
However, I have flown Jetblue and they are by far my favorite. My favorite airport to fly out of is the Long Beach airport in California. It is a small airport which makes it a breeze to get in and out of. The only problem is, because it is such a small airport your travel destinations are limited.