We have also had both, but much prefer the satellite. I love my dish, because unlike cable, you can take it anywhere with you. If you go camping or anything like that, you can bring your dish, hook it up wherever you are, and get the same programming you do at home without it costing you extra.
We have never had to brush snow off our dish, and we have snow most months of the year. I guess this depends on which satellite your dish is pointing to, the way ours is positioned, it is almost vertical so no snow would ever stick on it.
I find there is more variety in programming with the dish. If you get ABC East, you also get ABC West along with it. They do this with almost every basic network channel, so if I am not home to watch my show at 9pm, I know that I can catch it at 11pm when it airs on the West Coast.
We can bundle our dish with our land line and cell phone.
The only perk I found with cable was that you can change your premium channels on a whim without it costing you extra. For a while, I was getting HBO only one day per week so that I could watch the Sopranos, and then switching to a different channel for the rest of the week.
Hope this helps!~