With a little time and effort, you can create good panoramic images with Hugin, although it's not the most intuitive application, and can be awkward. There are tons of settings to play with for the advanced user, but the program itself offers little indication of what any of them does! The results can be impressive, but will need trimming, as they don't come out rectangular. Hugin is pretty good at finding control points - the overlapping parts of images - but it's not perfect. Basically, you have to import the images you want to 'stitch' together, then using a combination of automatic 'control point' finding, and doing so manually.
