Two general advantages of raw spring to mind.

One is that JPEG is limited to 8 bits per channel in dynamic range, whereas
raw gives you the full bit depth the sensor is capable of. Compact cameras
may inherently not have much more than 8 usable bits of dynamic range but
SLRs will have up to 14 (the raw file will probably be 16 bits per channel
but the lower bits will only be noise).

The second advantage is that the in-camera noise processing is not applied
to the raw, which means you will retain more shadow detail. With my Ricoh
GX100, despite Ricoh having quite a light touch in jpeg noise reduction,
there is nevertheless a lot more shadow detail in raws than jpegs. If you
have, say, a Panasonic camera, the difference is likely to be immense.

The third of the two advantages is that other in-camera processing is also
avoided, notably film effect highlights. By film effect I mean the abrupt
digital cutoff of highlight detail is often ameleorated by in-camera
processing which progressively attenuates the highlights to emulate the
shoulder found in film. This means that usable highlight detail is being
bleached out in order to prevent the scarring of a sudden cutoff. With raw,
all the tonal detail is retained up to the cutoff point. (A raw processor
like Ufraw can reinstate the film effect if scarred highlights are a
problem.)