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• Site collections (Database scope) 50,000 ... Total throughput degrades as the number of site collections increases.
• Web sites (Web site scope) 2,000 ... The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well much
  beyond 2,000 subsites.
• Web sites (Site collection) 250,000 - You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100
  sites each with 1000 subsites is 100,100 Web sites.
• Documents (Folder scope) 2,000 ... The interfaces for enumerating documents in a folder do not perform well beyond a thousand entries.
• Documents (Library scope) 2 million ... You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders.
• Security principals (Web site scope) 2,000 ... The size of the access control list is limited to a few thousand security principals, in other words users and groups in the Web site.
• Users ( Web site scope) 2 million ... You can add millions of people to your Web site by using Microsoft Windows security groups to manage security instead of using individual users.
• Items (List scope) 2,000 ... The interface for enumerating list items does not perform well beyond a few thousand items.
• Web Parts (Page scope) 100 ... Pages with more than 100 Web Parts are slow to render.
• Web Part personalization (Page scope) 10,000 ... Pages with more than a few thousand user personalizations are slow to render.
• Lists (Web site scope) 2,000 ... The interface for enumerating lists and libraries in a Web site does not perform well beyond a few thousand entries.
• Document size (File scope) 50 MB ... The file save performance degrades as the file size grows. The default maximum is 50 MB. This maximum is enforced by the system, but you can change it to any value up to 2 GB (2047 MB) if you have applied Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1.

For SharePoint Portal Server, here's an extract from the Capacity Planning whitepaper:

It is important to understand the ramifications of the different features and functions of the SharePoint Portal Server solutions to size the system so that the performance of the system is good.

The following table lists some of the SharePoint Portal Server objects and describes their recommended use. "Typical" indicates comfortable and well tested; "maximum" indicates that the system can support that number, but not without some performance ramifications or
special configurations.

An asterisk (*) indicates a hard limit; no asterisk indicates a tested or supported limit.

• Portal sites (full) - typically 2 ... maximum 15 *
• Portal sites (child) - typically 10 ... maximum 100 *
• Areas - typically 1,000 ... maximum 10,000
• Best Bets - typically 1,000 ... maximum 25,000
• Area depth - typically 5 ... maximum 20 *
• User profiles - typically 50,000 ... maximum 1,000,000
• Audiences - typically 500 ... maximum 10,000
• Audience memberships - typically 500,000 ... maximum 5,000,000
• SSO credentials - typically 100,00 ... maximum 100,000
• Search indexes - typically 3 ... maximum 32
• Content sources -typically 25 ... maximum 250
• Search scopes - typically 25 ... maximum 250 *
• Indexed documents per content index - typically 100,000 ... maximum 5,000,000
• Indexed documents - typically 2,500,000 ... maximum 20,000,000
• Thesaurus entries - typically 1,000 ... maximum 10,000
• Alerts - typically 50,000 ... maximum 1,000,000
• Team sites - typically 10,000 ... maximum 250,000
• Personal sites - typically 10,000 ... maximum 250,000