Anyway, you may have hit on it regarding the distance from the subject to the background by looking at the photos in Holadem's links. It looks like there may be a lot of separation there, although it's impossible to tell for certain.
but I looked through a bunch of shots at that pbase account, and I'm inclined to think most of the background blur came from PP editing blur, not from the original in-camera shots themselves. Most of the blur is just too smooth to be possible w/ such a digicam, and almost all of them (that I checked) present relatively easy compositions to apply PP editing blur to the background. Even a DSLR w/ a big, fast, long lens would have a hard time yielding the kind of blur shown in many of those shots unless shooting macro close-ups, and he has so very many of them. But people browsing photos on the web should understand that many photos have been edited to varying degrees before being displayed -- in fact, many are actually shot w/ the intention to be postprocessed in certain ways. It's all part of photography though most people don't realize this.
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I cheated and used my Christmas gift early -- a new lens for my Canon DSLR. In return, I gave my wife one of her gifts early -- a 15-inch LCD TV for her office/craft room. She doesn't know about the SD800 yet, so that will be a Christmas surprise.
