The conventional wisdom on the board is that the Mackie VLZ preamps are quite good and the 1202 mixer will give you a multi-pack of them. It will add a great deal of flexibility to your setup, too.
I use the 1604 (original version) which has the earlier preamps and I'm happy with them. The VLZ preamps are supposed to be even better.
It is a good purchase. Depending on your application, there may be better single or dual preamps you could buy for the money, but as a general purpose tool, you could do a lot worse.