I do hate that, "if I had a camera like yours..." If the person saying that has a camera with them, I say, "give me that." After poking through the menus, and looking at all the settings, I'll white balance on a piece of paper, and force the f-stop to be as low as possible, zoom in to shrink the DoF (unless it changes the f-stop too much). Then take a couple nice shots which will usually blow the camera owner away.
Now, I'm not saying I can't do better with a nicer camera. Being able to shoot raw is a huge plus. Real aperture and exposure settings also allow much finer control. (I usually use the 5-degree spot meter built into the camera, and set the exposure manually on the hottest point in the frame to get a nice "exposed to the right" on the histogram.) When I do use a flash, its nice to get it a few degrees away from the lens. Since I don't use zoom lenses any more (if you look closely at some of the older shots have chromatic aberration--pink fringes--typical of zoom use), it's nice to be able to swap to different lengths when needed.
So, a better camera does let me get better pictures, and it wasn't until I had a good camera that I fully understood what could actually be done with a digicam.
