Does gateway own acer or visa versa? which one should I get?

I was looking at an acer laptop the other day and noticed that it had the same logo as emachines (which I know that gateway owns them) it says empowering technology and the logo is an E in a green circle. so does gateway own acer? is acer a good brand? I am looking at a Acer AS4730-4516 it has a intel pentium dual core and 2 gb of ram or should I get a Compaq CQ60-215DX which has the same processor and ram but has 64bit vista premium instead of 32bit? Any help would be much appreciated!