Well, I am a novice here and I am open to see my own opinion change after direct, hands-on experience.

However, currently, the way I see this is that essentially DSLR offer opportunity. Given the same skills of the photographer, a DSLR will produce a bette result, and that is rewarding. Even more importantly, I think that a DSLR grows with you, as you learn and experiment. Which is even more rewarding. And fun.

This compensates the extra wiegth, the fact that I won't be able to carry a DSLR with me (which is why I am keeping my G11 as well of course), and that as you say it will be less practical in several occasions.

Just curious: are there super zooms out there that can do bulb-photography? That's something I could not do with my G11, which is really disappointing as I suppose a firmware upgrade would give that feature to the G11, and I had to resort to my gf's 550D. Which is one of the reasons why I started to use it and learn in the first place.