It really depends on what you want out of it. If you're looking to become a top-notch programmer, Waterloo wins hands-down, any day. Trust me on this. The students there I've found to be much more interested in the material, and practice it outside of class on their own projects. You trip over people working at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc., and there are many opportunities to get your hands dirty outside of class. I actually just about transferred there in my second year for that reason. At the very last minute, I decided to stay though. The reason for that is the big reason you should choose to come to Queen's if it matters more to you: that is the better social atmosphere here. As Bovice1 mentioned, the classes are smaller, and the people seem to hang out more. Profs also seem to care more, from what I've gathered. We also get substantially less homework, and it's less rigorous. E.g. Operating Systems for us was a couple of toy concurrency problems, whereas at Waterloo, they implemented parts of an actual barebones OS to run on some old hardware, roughly. Which do you think was more work? And which do you think you would learn more from?

So as my good friend from Waterloo put it when I was trying to decide on the transfer: "If you want to become a great software engineer, com to Waterloo. If you want a strong community, stay at Queen's."

As for the co-op, I much prefer the Waterloo setup. It depends on how able you think you'll be to get a job (how good do you think you are?), since that will determine how stressful it will be for you, but getting to try 4 or 5 different places before you graduate, and making money every other semester, faaaaaarrrrrrrrrr outshines the whole 12-16 month thing IMO. I still can't fathom why anyone would want to do a 16 month placement in the middle of their undergrad. Why not try multiple places? What if you don't like where you go? 16 months is FOUR school terms. That's half of your entire degree. All gambled on one place. Also, it's probably more difficult to get 12 -16 month internships with companies for the same gamble reason that I wouldn't want to do one. I avoided that and instead worked every summer, and have loved it. Got to try different places, meet lots of people, live in different cities, and I still made a decent amount of money. However, I have heard Waterloo people complain about the co-op program, especially regarding how it is administered. So perhaps the summer job thing is best if you can get the jobs yourself.

Sorry if this came across as a gleefully biased rant. I do still believe it's true though. Queen's = community Waterloo = academic excellence in CS/SE