Maria Sharapova DOES help them sell cameras, doesn't she?
Actually, I'm a Canon fan too. My dSLR and half my lenses are Canons.
ON the P&S side of the coin, I also bought my son an A710IS last summer and I'm really impressed with its image quality. It doesn't do well at higher ISO settings, but not many P&S will give you sharp, noise free pictures at ISO 800 and above, so that's not a huge issue to me. I'm also impressed with the video clips it captures. I think they look pretty good (not digital camcorder quality, but great for a cheap P&S camera) and I've found it to be a cool feature to have.
But there are two key features that sold me on that camera. First, it has a 6x optical zoom, which is HIGHLY unusual in that price range and class. Almost every other camera will have only a 3x zoom. But to me the biggest reason to buy that camera was that it has full manual controls. Being able to override camera settings has gotten me better pictures than on any other cheap P&S I've had.
That model has since been replaced by the A720IS, which has the added "advantage" of a few more megapixels. I'm not convinced that more megapixels is actually a good thing in this type of camera, but I still asked for one for my birthday. I think it would be great to carry around for times when I want a small camera to just "take pictures" rather than carry the bulk of my dSLR to "do photography".
I've also had one Fuji (the S9000) and one Panasonic (FZ-30) but they're older models now. Both took fantastic pictures but they were nearly as bulky as a dSLR and it doesn't sound like that's what you're looking for.
