If archery takes a little more investment to get so much out of it, I think the ability to more easily get full attacks and hand out a lot of damage relatively safely makes up for it.
That's missing my point. It's perfectly fine that, if you want to be good at something, you should sink feats into being good at it.
The issue is that *every* archer ends up taking the *same* feats in largely the same order. It's not an issue of power, but an issue of over-standardization.
I'm also OK with it taking a feat or two for a Dex-based fighter to get close to the strength-based fighter's ability. Dexterity has so many other valuable adventuring uses for skills, Reflex saves, AC, initiative, and missile attacks that without extra costs to make it as useful for melee attacks as well, the stat would be too dominant.
Obviously, I disagree that paying two feats to still be worse off than if you'd just avoided the issue entirely is a good trade-off.* You could, instead, take those two feats you saved and spend them on Lightning Reflexes and Improved Lightning Reflexes, and have a pretty darn good Reflex save, in addition to rolling better damage (EDIT: both because of your Strength bonus, and because you'll generally be using a better base-damage weapon [LS vs. rapier / shortsword, etc.]).
Your AC will, generally, end up about the same going Strength over Dex (you'll have a worse Touch AC, but a better FF, with Armor + Dex being roughly equivalent across armor types).
You'd be missing out on ability bonuses to Acrobatics, Disable Device, Escape Artist, Fly, Ride, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth. To the dedicated melee combatant's point of view, Acrobatics is really the only killer app, here (and possibly Ride, if you're a Cavalier type). In exchange, you're picking up bonuses in Climb and Swim (which, you know, ... eh ...). So that's pretty much a win for the Dex-based guy, especially given your ACPs will make most of the Dex skills undoable routinely as a Str-based character.
The Dex-based guy will have better ranged attack bonuses - but, if a bow-user, will do less damage per hit (assuming tailored composite bows or thrown weapons). To make ideal use of this advantage, however, you'll further need to spend the "archer feat tax," elsewise we're just comparing the initial attack before melee combat is joined, and a slight advantage here for the Dex-based guy does not outweigh the long-term advantage of the Strength-based guy over the course of a longer fight.
Additionally, we're discussing the way in which the PF rules handle Dex-based melee fighters; pointing out that they make great archers is, at best, a minor point, since if I wanted to play an archer, I'd be playing an archer.
[EDIT: In summation, in 3.5 you paid 1 feat to be slightly behind your Strength-based counterpart. In Pathfinder, the same 1 feat gets you much less closer to your Str-based counterpart, and you have to spend 2 feats to be more-or-less where you would have been in 3.5.]
I realize that I'm probably not going to convince anyone of anything, here, and that we're getting a bit far afield from the OP's question, so perhaps this can be the end of it, and we can move on to other things?
* Note - I'm not saying that it's an
awful trade-off, merely that it isn't fantastic, and that I wish it were better.
