Christmas Camera Shopping Technique and Recommendation

I've been thinking about good point and click cameras lately, and I'm a big fan of the Ricoh Caplio R4.  I've played with it myself, and enjoyed some great pictures of flowers from it.  But I was recently looking at a report of the most popular cameras on flickr, and noticed that you could see pictures taken with the different cameras. 

Because Flickr supports searching pictures taken by a particular camera, you can (as in the flowers link above) search for pictures of flowers taken by your camera.  I recommend checking a few common scenarios like longexposure, indoor, etc and compare them with a nice DSLR (I currently use a Canon Rebel XT although I really need more lenses (hint, hint family :)) - longexposure, indoor).