I'll add my voice to the above and say that my American classic sunburst Strat is about the best. I've got about a dozen guitars, four nice acoustics and the rest electric, including Gibsons, Ibanez, even a Ric 12-string. But the Strat is my go-to axe for anything from soft ballads to country pickin' to blues to rock-n-roll. The Ibanez is for slamming, the Les Paul is for Southern rock/blues, etc. but when I carry one guitar to a gig, it's the Strat.
Now that said, I got annoyed by the single-coil hum/noise, so I retrofitted a full set of DiMarzio humbuckin' Strat replacements, only lost a tiny bit of the very top end single-coil shimmer, and they're totally silent even in a room where everybody else is getting 60 Hz buzz.