I'd be extremely cautious of the Canon P&S cameras, I bought a new one last year and I'm so p*ssed off at Canon I'll never buy one of their products again. The image quality was utterly appalling and the focus was dire, from a few hundred photo's I couldn't tell what it thought it was focussing on. As far as I can tell the problem is most people don't really want decent quality and will settle for something really quite poor, Canon seem to be happy to produce cameras for that market. That's not to say they don't produce some really good models still but it does mean you can't just pick one up off the shelf, or buy it online like I did, based on the published spec' and expect it be be usable. It's also not to say other manufacturers aren't playing exactly the same game.
It's pretty obvious to me when I see some peoples photo's that aren't very good that the problem isn't them but it's the camera, people tend to assume it's them when it's not
Personally, I use a Ricoh GX200 and a Nikon D40 DSLR both of which I really, really rate. The Ricoh is a small "rangefinder" style camera and not easy to use but the quality I think is fantastic.
The one really valuable lesson I learnt from the piece of junk I got from Canon was to ignore the reviews and spec's and look for real examples, if you look on Flickr you can find hundred or thousands of sample images from pretty much any camera. Had I done that before buying the A1000 from Canon I'd have seen not one of those images was any good, none of them were properly focussed, none had decent depth of field or any detail through the image.