Pros
At least in my department (College of Communication) they do a good job of making sure that teaching assistants are trained well to handle the load that's placed upon them, and they're willing to communicate with you and help you. They've tried to make things easier on TAs recently by cutting teaching loads somewhat as well.
Cons
My pay is okay here, but it barely covers rent, and that's assuming you stay in an apartment that's at the low end of the spectrum. This may be a factor of my assistantship only being .25 FTE (I know many other people do 0.5 FTE), but I know other institutions pay their TAs/GAs a lot more since I have a lot of friends at other places. But even with the cuts they've made to the teaching loads, its still a lot and it still takes up a lot of time.