I'll disagree with 67Firebird. Stainless steel, as a metal, is relatively "soft" and the finish scratches easily. Frankly, I'd rather have a blued gun than a stainless one, this is based on experience with a LOT of both types of finishes.
For me, there's only one finish beyond blue, that is taking a blued gun and having it hard-chromed (various trade names like Armalloy, Metalloy, and others). I've had stainless guns that scratched easily, but I had a 1911 competition gun hard-chromed (that gun got shot a LOT over the years, enough that the frame cracked after 20+ years of hard shooting). Even after the frame cracked, the gun still looked like new, and it had been dragged out of numerous holsters over the years. Before I got it hard-chromed, I'd worn the blue clean off the gun, and had even changed the dimensions on the slide from the drag on suede-lined holsters.
If I were to buy another 1911 for such purposes, I'd get the thing hard-chromed, even if it were stainless. I've scratched the finishes off numerous Rugers and Smith and Wessons, (the Smiths were the worst, by far, they scratched like a sonuvagun). I also worked at an indoor shooting range/gun shop for awhile, and saw all manner of guns coming into the place. Usually, the stainless guns looked like they'd been dragged down the road behind a pickup, even if the owner was careful. The Second Generation Smith autos were the worst, but the Third Generation guns would scratch up, too. Smith revolvers generally kept a good appearance if they were owned by a civilian, but the cops let their guns go to Hell, and most police trade-ins looked like crap (we sold a lot of those, one of our suppliers was a police distributor who took in the revolvers when the cops went to SIGs or Glocks.
