And the flip side is that the P'n'S that you bring to everything can never take a really decent photo.
Sorry, but utter BS.
I was once part of a photography club. The members would regularly have internal competitions. The winning entries were more often than not from high quality non-DSLRs. The photographers had years of experience, owned DSLRs, but ultimately found smaller cameras to be more convenient.
Technical aspects (camera features, optics, etc) do help, but they are merely one reason among many that you get good photos. Other factors are opportunity, photographer skill, and yes, the number of photos you take.
As someone once said:
Most of Ansel Adams's photos were crap. I know that because most of all photographers' photos are crap - you just see the good ones.
If you're buying a camera that will reduce the likelihood of you taking photos, then you're likely going to get fewer good photos than with an inferior camera with which you take a lot more photos.
To get to the rest of your comment:
The quality of the P'n'S image will limit what can be done, sometimes severely limit it. A DSLR camera will let you go further since the raw image is better.
Many non-DSLR's offer raw. This isn't 2001.
At this point I believe all DSLRs offer a .tiff or .raw format that the Gimp can work with, or an uncompressed .jpg format which is usually just as good as a .tiff.
First, almost all good point and shoots offer TIFF. When I bought my first digital point and shoot in 2001, all the "good" cameras offered uncompressed TIFFs.
But that's all irrelevent because: A TIFF format is almost useless. You simply have a huge file with no lossy compression. This does not give you the extra manipulation headroom that you get with RAW. The benefits of RAW do not carry over to TIFFs.
These uncompressed files give you all the detail that the camera actually saw.
Not true. Uncompressed TIFFs have less information than RAW.
Seriously, how did this comment get moderated up?