Wow!

Wow. I took some test pictures indoors and out and the colours are amazing. Sharp, clear images, fantastic screen, and so easy to use. Metering seems brilliant. Even the one I took through a glass window in bright sunlight came out well.
If you're a pixel peeper though who loves to zoom in miles on the screen or enlarge to A1 it may not be adequate as the noise reduction results in less ultimate sharpness than my old fuji F30. The fuji has super CCD, only 6MP and that does make for almost non-existant noise levels at low ISOs.
The canon has more megapixels crammed into a smaller sensor.
Much easier to take a good picture on the canon though thanks to better metering and image stabilisation. Plus menu's are better.
If you want SLR quality pictures from a compact buy a 2nd hand fuji F31 (improves metering over the F30). Be prepared to tweak saturation, and muck around with exposure settings.
If you want very good pictures when viewed so the picture is as it was taken (not a tiny bit of it enlarged) or to print out on A4/A3 then this will more than suffice.
Miles better than the Z100FD fuji I had before, and a considerable improvement on Ixus 950 which was softer and less punchy. If you don't like the punchy colours which make the sky look phenominal it has natural colours option and you can change contrast and sharpness and saturation to your taste using the in camera menu.
Its very new but so far I'm very impressed.