The first concern I have with the 18-270mm is the aperture. f/6.3?! That's ridiculous. F/6.3 would only be useable in either extremely well lit situations, or if you were using a flash. Personally, I would consider the lens useable from 18mm to wherever f/5.6 kicked in, which I'm guessing would be around 150mm. I've heard the lens at 18mm is hideous, though, so let me revise the useable part to around 30mm to probably 150mm or so. By now, there's probably already a lens similar in price that will look much better within that range.
The second concern I have with this lens, is 18-270mm is a huge range, which means there's a lot of glass that's moving around. At $400 or so, I'm guessing the alignment of the glass and elements isn't that great throughout the range, which makes me assume the sharpness and image quality is pretty poor.
After thinking about it for a while though, I thought maybe it would be okay for someone who, like my mom, isn't a professional, and just wants to take photos of their kid. They're not looking for the best image quality, they just want to use one lens all of the time to get okay shots of their kid playing sports. This lens would provide just that, and be a perfect fit for what my mom is looking for. But then I realized, what's the point in owning a dSLR then? DSLRs provide much higher quality images than a small point-and-shoot, but at the price of being bigger, heavier, and lens swapping. My mom, or anyone who doesn't want to deal with switching lesnes, could spend a fraction of what they did for a dSLR and get the same convenience in a point-and-shoot, and when comparing a point-and-shoot to a dSLR with a lens like the 18-270mm, the images probably won't look much different.
One more thing I would like to rant about, is someone said to me, "sometimes shooting in automatic mode is better than shooting in manual." Let me just take a moment to pick this statement apart.
This is the most absurd thing I have ever heard in my life. I'll try to explain why in an example after I say this; you know what you want your photo to look like, your camera doesn't. Your camera will try its hardest to make a good guess, but that's as far as it will get. Expecting your photo to look just how you want it when you shoot in auto is like pushing the "potato" button every time you put something in your microwave, even if the food you're trying to cook isn't a potato...
At my computer desk right now, there's a Coke can. I'll take a photo in auto, see what the settings are, and then let you know what I would have wanted in this type of situation. The lighting is poor, so I'm guessing the camera will raise the ISO to a ridiculously high value, and use the flash. I've never used a dSLR in auto mode though, so I'm not entirely sure what will happen.
The camera decided ISO 800 was adequate, at f/2.8, a shutter speed of 1/60, and with the pop up flash.
I shot the same photo at ISO 640, f/1.8, and 1/50th of a second. In my opinion, my photo may be a little under exposed, but that's why I shoot RAW, to fix little things like that. The first photo is the photo shot in automatic, and the second one is the one I took. If you've read my other post about flash, you know I, along with many others, aren't all that satisfied with the pop up flash. The only time I use the pop up flash is to trigger my speedlights. You might not be able to tell a difference really between the two, but if this was more of a real world situation, such as a portrait, the pop up flash would have ruined the photo.
Somehow this post turned in to a two subject thing.
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