So true about Pepsi and the other known brands. It's a lot different when you have the money.
But I also believe you can use a made-up word and combine it with a more familiar word to help make your domain memorable. Since a lot of the shorter, catchy, two-word domain names have been taken some sites choose to do this. For example, BlogBizzle.com or SiteShaBang.com (only examples). Even though it's not completely clear what those sites are about, you get an idea since they contain one common word.
If you build your brand and become popular people will remember that name because it's short and quirky. As Rob said, no reason you can't work on building your own wierd-name brand.
Search engines are so focused on backlinks these days (and the overall picture) that I don't think it will hurt you much for choosing a different name.
And in the case of signatures (Greg1's point), you can still add a line of text below the link to describe what your site is about. Most people do that anyway.
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