Granite granite granite! The end.
Actually, there are a number of material options and each has some kind of upside.
Granite:
The standard for the modern high-end kitchen. It's a natural stone cut from sacred grounds and polished with children's tears, making it heat, scratch and impact resistant. Usually has a "flowy" pattern in it from when it was born as lava. Every piece is different, so you go to a granite gallery and pick out your exact slab(s) like it were a lobster dinner. Installed cost starts around $70 per square foot and rises dramatically with exoticness of slab choice. Strong enough to support undermount sinks.
Quartz:
A synthetic stone, made from crushed natural stuff. Sometimes includes fun "grit" like crushed glass. It's also non-porous, so it's naturally stain resistant (unlike granite, which must be sealed to achieve that). Otherwise functionally identical to granite, but the finish is a lot more consistent and typically only has micro-patterns in it.
Marble:
A luxurious finish typically seen in bathrooms, is visually similar granite, though extreme patterns are rarer and it tends to have more of a "wispy" appearance. However, it did not start life as molten hot lava and actually makes a poor choice for kitchens because it's reactive with acid. Therefore, lemon juice equals a dulled/damaged countertop. Similar cost to granite.
Dupont Corian (or similar):
A molded plastic top that is most notable for being completely seamless. I haven't talked about seams yet, but since the stone materials above come in slabs, any surface you can't fit on a single slab has to be joined from multiple pieces. While cheaper than the stone alternative, Corian is also far less damage-resistant. It's plastic after all, remember? We're basically talking a countertop made out of a football helmet ... so it will melt if you put a hot pot on it and scrape if you stick a knife in it. Cost is usually around half of the stone options.
Granite tile:
Well, it's granite, in tile form. It's thin, can crack more easily and is graced by the presence of grout. While it's a lot cheaper (tiles are under $10 a square foot), the grout makes it hard to clean and its thinness means you have to add a face to make it look ok. This face-to-top joint will also have visible grouting. On the flipside, it's still actual granite and if you're selling a house, you can check the "granite countertop" checkbox.
Butcher block:
Usually more of a style decision, butcher block is an attractive top made from glued-together solid planks of wood. In many ways it's similar to having a wood tabletop for your counter. Wood resists some heat, but can scorch under very hot pans. Clearly it's only somewhat durable, scuffs and cuts are likely to accumulate over time.
Veneered board:
The basic. It's cheap. You cut some plywood or mdf to fit your cabinet and put some veneer on top. The end.
A big upside of the premium tops (granite and quartz) is their ability to accomodate an undermount sink (which is actually just glued to the underside of the countertop, though additional support beams can be installed in the cabinet). Undermount sinks are nice because you can simply sweep mess from the counter into them instead of having to get it up over a sink lip. Both materials come in slabs with sharp edges and corners. Most people like to put some kind of rounded edge on them. You should ease (that's the technical term for rounding them off) them at least a little bit, otherwise they're sharp enough to be seriously uncomfortable when leaning against them and the corners could definitely puncture someone.
It seems that granite slabs are generally larger than quartz. This is potentially relevant when planning the shape of your countertop. We chose quartz and the smaller slabs forced us to put a seam through one section of our counter: we had the option to either have the last 2 feet be a separate piece or to put the seam through the sink (which is a little weird, technically speaking). We opted for the sink route and it was the right decision, however if we'd gone with granite this wouldn't have been an issue at all. Luckily the lack or marco pattern in quartz does allow it to hide seams well. Due to the complexity of the cut, however, the first try was a fail and that section of our countertop had to be redone. This pushed back our tiler by a full week while he was waiting for the entire stretch of countertop to be ready (and then due to our tile snafu, slipped almost an entire extra week!).
Work with your countertop designer to ensure that the countertops you want come from slabs that don't end up with seams in places you don't want them. My mom did a remodel; their counters have a visible lava flow in them so the exact cuts and orientations of the pieces matter (to keep the lava flow effect through the entire kitchen). They almost got burned because they bought 2 slabs of the granite and were hairs away from needing a 3rd; by that time there were no matching pieces left. Due to the uniqueness of the pattern, there was literally no way to get another matching piece. In other words, if you are going with granite, consider the pattern and the cuts very carefully.
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