I'm going to break ranks with most of the previous posters on this thread and admit that I usually enjoy the banter on podcasts. For me, it makes me feel part of a community and increases my commitment and interest in the podcast. In Escape Pod, I think the intros and outtros are great - in fact, my normal method of listening is to listen to the intro, fast forward past the story, listen to the outtro, and then rewind back to the beginning of the story. And I really enjoy Air Out My Shorts, the entire point of which is taking a short story and burying it with so much banter that it's often difficult to tell the two apart (especially when they interrupt the story to start riffing on some line or other). Psuedopod, on the other hand, I find less compelling, and a large chunk of that is the relative sparsity of the commentary. Not that I don't enjoy the stories - I do - but it's pretty rare that I don't listen to an Escape Pod episode immediately when it comes up, but a Pseduopod episode can sit on my ipod for weeks before I'll get to it.
What I do really hate, though, is what Russell mentioned in the above post - repeated introductions, long intro music, and especially - and this is a peeve with Escape Pod too - outro music. I really, really hate it when the dialogue ends and I have to listen for a minute and a half of music I don't enjoy just so that iTunes will consider the podcast listened to completely and remove it from my iPod. I don't mind it once in a while when there's a reason for it, but I'm really sick of hearing the same Daikaiju track. At least Steve starts the track before he finished speaking. Some of the APM podcasts have about 2 minutes of random junk at the end (I also hate outro ads, for the same reason, but at least I can see that they have a purpose, given that they help support the podcast).