It is really difficult to fault the Canon Powershot series cameras. I am not a point & shoot guy, but I am really happy with my Canon PS SD870IS. (Somewhat similar to the SD1100 mentioned here.) The colors are natural and vivid looking, unlike some cameras that either produce dull colors or overexaggerate colors to the point that the photo actually looks enhanced. Many Powershots offer quite a few manual controls--the ones I use are manual exposure, manual shutter speed for long exposures (1 to 15 seconds), and of course manual white balance, etc. As far as I could tell, the Powershots were the only ones with a complete manual shutter speed, which I love for taking nighttime scenery shots.

If ease of use is important, the Kodak EasyShare cameras have pop-up dialogs that tell you specifically what each scene setting is used for (beach, scenery, fireworks, etc.) and in general there are dialog boxes that explain each setting. Very nice, but they do limit features to make them easy to use.

For 95% of the people out there, just about any digital camera will produce very nice results. Some just do a little better for the 95th+ percentile.