Why use the Entity Framework?

There are a number of places where you can read an introduction to the Entity Framework, listen to a podcast about it, or watch a screen cast or video of an interview. Even with these various resources, though, there are so many different data access technologies out there that it's not uncommon for me to get the question: Why should I use the Entity Framework? Or what differentiates it from other options like just using ADO.Net SqlClient and friends, LINQ to SQL or something like nHibernate? I like the second question better, because the truth is that different problems merit different solutions.