Converting MapInfo TAB and/or MIF to SHP using free tools or ArcGIS for Desktop core product?
You can also do this with QGIS. Basically, QGIS acts as a GUI for ogr2ogr.
Just load the Mapinfo file, right-click the layer in TOC and go to "Save as ..." where you can chose from many output formats.
You can use ogr2ogr:
ogr2ogr -f 'ESRI Shapefile' output.shp input.mif
NB: For Windows, use double quotes around the driver name: ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" output.shp input.mif
To handle different geometries in one file in one pass (windows example):
for %%a in (linestring point polygon) do ogr2ogr -skipfailures -nlt %%a outdir\%%a input.tab
Or in Linux (Bash):
for a in linestring point polygon; do ogr2ogr -skipfailures -nlt $a outdir/$a input.tab; done
George is correct, although for me, the toolbar is named ArcView 8x Tools.
For TAB files, ogr is pretty handy as well, and will handle lots of formats - http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_formats.html
ogr2ogr - http://www.gdal.org/ogr2ogr.html
Easiest install is probably with FWTools - http://fwtools.maptools.org/windows-main.html