I got my Canon PowerShot S3 IS this morning, and my, what a fine camera it is.
I've still got cold feet on the DSLR thing, so the S3 is a good way to get somewhere towards that sort of thing without breaking the bank.
It's got a mazillion features, like most cameras these days, but the highlights for me (and the features that attracted me to it) are:
12x optical zoom
optical image stabilisation
Auto exposure bracketing
6MP sensor (i.e. not too many pixels)
Stereo video at 640x480
Can do RAW with a firmware twiddle
Easy as pie to use
Well assembled and frankly, a good-looking piece of kit
The image stabilisation is a breath of fresh air, as is the speedy startup and snapping - just 1.5 seconds from off to snap, and 1/10 of a second from pressing button to pic on card. Frame-to-frame is less than .25 of a second in sports mode. This should prove useful in a couple of weeks' time when I go to see the BTCC racing at Croft.
Faults: the LCD is a bit small, and there's an awful lot of buttons. Canon don't ship a rechargeable battery pack, which is just daft on a camera that uses 4 AA batteries at a time.
Other things I'll need: a copy of Photomatix, which will create HDR images from the 3 images that the camera can automatically take, a proper camera bag, and a nice fast SD card. I got a regular 2GB card in the box, but more is always better.