I have Canon D60 digital SLR and it has transformed my photography.
One method of taking a single great photograph is to take a lot of bad photographs in between. It is not unusual to take 50-100 pictures in a day and delete 45 of them at night. This used to bother me, but not anymore.
I come from a film background and I have always been careful in composing shots, but is invigorating, and also fun, to go and shoot what interests me, instead of what I think will make a good picture. Some of my best pictures are serendipitous events made possible by multiple shots of the same subject. You can do the same with film, but you better have deep pockets.
A digital SLR like the Canon and Nikon and others, has the ability to use lenses available for their other SLR film cameras, so lens quality and selection is not an issue. Canon makes a 16-35mm f/2.8L lens that translates into a 25.6mm-56mm equivalent focal length lens(35mm film equivalent) when multiplied by the 160% enlargement caused by the CCD size differential. Any wider angle and you have a fish-eye lens anyway.
I agree that film and traditional film processing have a slight edge in some instances, but by the time you scan a photograph into your computer, all you have is a copy anyway.
Digital photography is superior in it's ability to correct, after the fact, bad lighting conditions that will ruin film images. Techniques like digital blending of photographs for increased dynamic range can increase the dynamic range of your image by 6 or more f stops. In that technique, you can expose for the highlight and shadows separately and blend the images effortlessly. Try that with film.
You can also stitch multiple digital images together to get super megapixel(100 megapixel+) images that you can enlarge to the size of a house without loss of quality. Try that with film. There are tutorials on the web to explain how.
I mostly shoot in raw format and I can get 35-40 pictures on a 256Mb Card that costs $45 and is reusable nearly forever. You can carry 10 cards in one pocket. Try that with 10 rolls of film. I also don't worry about airport x-rays ruining my entire shoot.
Digital's not for everyone, Hey, some people are still using tape casettes, but anyone who tries the upper level Digital SLR's will never go back to film.
The point and shoot digital camera issue is a different issue entirely.
