But there's a movement afoot to build greater image-processing power into cameras, doing all of those operations right there on the device.
Personally, I'd never do that. I shoot RAW, and then handle on my desktop -- and calibrated monitor -- all of the adjustments. If nothing else, no matter how good the camera's CPU, the awful display on the back of the camera makes serious work impossible. It just can't be big enough if it's on the back of a convenient camera, and it won't be calibrated.
But for your average person taking photos of the kids at their soccer game, they don't care about any of that. The camera makers do a pretty good job of fine-tuning the heuristics (white balance, color adjustment, sharpening, etc.) so that the JPEG the camera produces is usually quite good, even if it's not excellent.
These people will be the ones driving a new "broadcast" image format. For quality stuff, the enthusiasts and pros have DNG and TIFF.
Facebook's introduction of 2000px wide images (close to the output of most consumer cameras) makes this all the more important. If Facebook's letting people upload directly from their cameras to the site with no scaling, the format the camera uses is a big deal.
Also, Facebook is a very large portion of photos shared over the web.
If you look at something like cnn.com or arstechnica.com - most images on that page have been scaled, cropped, composited with other images and finally re-encoded.