Hi,
It depends on your interpretation of "ideal" ...
Certainly it is ideal in some way to use DPP for Canon pictures to convert as this application "understands" the informations in the Canonrawfile directly.
But it may also be "ideal", if you concentrate on workflow as it is and want to do things as fast as possible, this may lead to use Photoshop with its ACR.
But it may also be "ideal", if you want to do the the procedure the way you like it, then you may use different applications for importing, converting and editing.
My workflow is: Photo Mechanic for importing, rating, keywording, selecting, even searching (not only basically), Bibble5 or CaptureOne for special converting if necessary and as a database application I now use ExpressionMedia (I did use iViewMedia until Microsoft bought the company) again, as PhaseOne did buy the company from Microsoft recently. If I need editing, I use Photoshop Elements.