I've heard that Canon's DPP 4, while not a great image editing program, may produce better colors than Lightroom for photographers that shoot and process raw images, so I decided to test this out for myself.  In these test images I tried to do as little in each program as possible, mostly picking the color profile, cropping, noise reduction and sharpening.

I think in most cases the colors are very similar.  Sometimes the colors look the same as in the deer image and sometimes there was a slight difference as in the blue color of the hawk image.  DPP did seem to have stronger sharpening and the auto lighting optimizer tool seems to work well.  Overall, I'm sure its worth the extra effort to use both DPP and Lightroom.  Let me know what you think in the comments below.

In the images below I did more post processing to bring them closer to finished images.

At first I liked the green background from DPP better but it may just be brighter.