[benjamincburns]

From a "this is a traditional camera" standpoint, megapixel specs aren't completely meaningless, but they're certainly not the be-all, end-all.

However from a "what can I do with this thing as a sensor?" standpoint, more spatial resolution is in fact more power. Take a look at light field mapping [1] and the Lytro camera [2]. The technique uses an array of micro lenses placed over a traditional image sensor to capture many small low resolution images from many slightly different vantage points. Then a deconvolution algorithm is used as sort of a reverse ray tracing algorithm to actually map out the way light is bouncing around the scene. As a result you can generate many many different images of the scene in post processing, with whatever focus characteristics you want.

In this case the optics are relatively cheap compared to traditional camera optics, but the hardware to handle the deconvolution isn't.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_photography 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro

Edit: To your original point however, in theory oversampling can be used to make up for crappy optics using techniques similar to light field mapping. Some mobile image sensors have a microlens array similar to that used in light field photography (OmniVision comes to mind). However in practice this requires that your crappy optics be consistent in how they're crappy, which presents other challenges.

I'm with you, though. When someone builds a cell phone camera with 120dB of dynamic range I'll get excited.