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I'm with Charlie: the question can be understood many ways. Lots of
chances for good answers.

He's also got the same impulse: shoot and enjoy shooting everything.
My trouble seems to be: I enjoy the shooting as much as--or more
than--the product, which serves primarily as a reminder of the great
rush of doing the deed.

Follows, then, that the equipment is not nearly as important to me as
to many others. I use two or three different point-and-shooters, and
two dSLRS, all very satisfying to me, even though some don't blow up
to 16x20 all that good.

Some of the most useful pieces of work I do are simply for recording
important data: what is the license plate of that monster pickup truck
next to me in the parking lot, in case the driver pokes a hole in my
door skin? Who are those college kids who parked in front of my house
the first week of school (next week!) and thought it was OK to smoke a
little crack before class? What did the gas pump say when I filled up
the SUV, and what did the car's odometer say? Is that _really_ a 1947
MG TC cruising down Chase Avenue at 3:35 on a weekday afternoon?
Mundane but useful.

To reassert my underlying theme: doing what makes you feel good can be
as important as making a good image; it doesn't take superior
equipment to make photography satisfying and worthwhile. My advice
would be that if you don't have a long history of picture-making, you
might be better off logging some production with something less
complex than a dSLR, so you'll be able to make better choices for your
own use, when you decide the (considerable) investment is worth it.

I use the P&Ss pretty much daily, the dSLRs not often enough.

P&S, each outstanding in some way:
Panasonic LUMIX LX1
Canon S500
Minolta Dimmidge Xt

dSLR, for the near-pro uses:
Canon 20D
Canon RebXT (350D)
/With lenses:
   50mm 1.8 version II (inexpensive and versatile)
   90mm macro (Tamron version 1)
   18-55mm "Kit" lens (not USM; rough conditions lens)
   10-22mm EF-S (won't work with a full-frame camera, but
     essential to my way of viewing things)
   24-70mm L (an essential, marvelous instrument)
   70-200 2.8L IS (an essential, marvelous instrument)
   70-300mm DO IS (works good, but a little of an early mistake)
   1.4x extender (version II)
   2.0x extender (version II)
   Extension Tube EF12 (close focusing with the L lenses)

Some of my 'best' stuff was made with a kind of intermediate set of
equipment: Nikon CP5700, 8700 and 5000 with tele and wide adapters. If
the equipment snobs in this and other such groups hadn't made dSLR
seem so attractive, I might still be using sophisticated P&S cameras,
and be a whole lot richer.

That about covers it. You'll see from my 'gallery' that even with
heavy-duty hardware, it's easy to make not-very-good photographs.

Here's a 'gallery' of images I liked/like (digital begins in 2003;
although I had some digital cameras much earlier than that, they
didn't do much for me):
http://www.fototime.com/inv/6A6447AEF0606E3