MoaB,
I hope you enjoy my two cents.
First, are you already invested in SD cards? If not, don't fear CF either. It's the de facto standard for pro photography for a reason (and no more expensive).
Second, AA batteries. The upside? You can get batteries anywhere. The downside(s)? If you get rechargeable AA (even Eneloop, the best out there) they will not last NEARLY as long. If you get the "digital device" batteries, they will last a bit longer, but be more pricey and you still have to replace them a lot. In the end, the convenience of AA batts is rather costly.
Well, if you don't want to pay for SLR, but you want good shots in almost all situations, you're going to need a P&S with excellent manual controls and you'll need to learn to use them. The auto and scene modes NEVER net the best results on a P&S camera. I used to fire a Kodak DX10, never left "M". Now that I'm a pro-Canon guy, I can honestly say that Canon has great manual settings on all it's psuedo-SLR cams (like the PowerShot S5 IS listed above). On the true P&S cams, it's generally decent. I'd still go with Canon anyhow because of the sensor quality.
Zoom... be wary of digital zoom. It sucks across the board, without fail. This is the ultimate downside to non-SLR (fixed lens) cameras. a 10x zoom on one kodak is not the same as a 10x zoom on another kodak, let alone a canon or epson or pentax or < insert manufacturer here >. with an "x" zoom rating, it's so many times longer than the widest angle the lens can capture. It's very misleading. If the lens is wide (say 24mm) and it has 5x optical zoom, you can zoom to 120mm equivalent. Now look at the data there. 24mm is fairly wide, but because the lens and sensor are so small, there will be a lot of distortion on the edges, or the manufacturer will compensate for that by setting up the camera with a cropped sensor type of feel (where the 24mm actually seems longer than 24). Also, 120mm isn't very long. A lot of pro studio photographers do portraits with 135mm lenses. They still manage to do this in a largish studio. It isn't exactly telephoto and also lends itself to the problems mentioned above. The moral of all of this is, really look into zoom options on any camera you buy.
Compact cameras will not generally take as good of pictures as less compact cameras. Making the sensor smaller makes the picture quality lower (espcially at higher ISO settings, shots in darker situations). REALLY slim cameras take REALLY bad pictures.
As mentioned above, the megapixel rating is not the end-all thing to look at. There are 12MP cameras that take crappy pictures and 4, 6 and 8MP cameras that are years old that take amazing pictures. Again, a lot of this is based on the sensor size.
Anoter point for taking good pictures in almost all situations. Check that you can manually control the aperature size (or f-stop value). Also, make sure the maximum aperature (smallest number) is something amazingly low. 2.8 is good. Lower is great! Higher will make low-light photos not as good and prevent you from doing shots with much depth of field.
Lastly, robot_parade, did you actually just call a kit lens on a dSLR a "3x" lens? Grrr! Bad Robot! Bad! :-p I assume it's something like an 18-55mm. You can't really say 3x, though, as a 100-300mm lens is still a "3x" zoom lens, but is so vastly different that comaprison isn't reasonable. Stop thinking point and shoot, start thinking SLR
