It sounds as she wants a dslr camera with interchangeable lenses, although the new bridge cameras like the Canon G10 are very competent. The advantages of the compact style is that they are smaller, lighter, not much risk of dust on the sensor, and you don't have to fiddle about changing lenses. However, for action shots the "shutter lag" is very limiting, and they still don't hack it when it comes to versatility & image quality. More megapixels is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to compacts...
Until you get to the pro camera level, there really isn't much to chose between t