[phyzome]

Ouch, yeah, so the situation may actually be getting worse.

The best camera is the one you have... and I'm not going to have any if I have to carry around extra lenses. Most of my photos are spur of the moment so I rely on being able to carry around my camera all the time. Realistically, I'm only going to carry around an integrated lens camera, no bigger than a Powershot S5 (which is already pretty big!)

[zacherates]

Just because you can change the lenses on your camera, doesn't mean you have to. There are zoom lenses with pretty extreme ranges that are even pretty compact like the Olympus 14-150mm and slightly pricier 12-200mm for Micro Four-Thirds. Now, I have a soft spot in my heart for MFT, realistically, it's a system that probably doesn't have too much of a future unfortunately (though not currently defunct at the time of this writing).

If you're more concerned about the future of the system than compactness, there are full frame superzoom lenses like the 18-400mm from Tamron (for Canon EF or Nikon mounts). One of the big benefits of interchangeable lens systems is not necessarily the ability to collect a bunch of glass and swap it out constantly (that's more of risk actually), but rather to figure out the glass that suits the shooting you do and use that. When I was getting started, I bought a bunch of different primes, and it took me a while to settle down, but since I got the Canon L-series standard zoom (1993 vintage), it's just the lens that's on my camera that I use all the time.