I have done some RAW testing since posting this thread. Certainly the folks who mentioned RAW PP are correct that there's a lot in those Q RAWs that the JPEG engine doesn't drag out. For me, I find the break over point to be about ISO640. Up to 640, the JPEG engine does just as well as ACR or Raw Therapee (provided you set it up well). Over and including 640 RAW is preferable, and I'd say over ISO 1250 RAW is necessary.
I post processed some really high ISO shots and I'm pretty astonished what I could get out of the RAWs. Here's an ISO 2500 shot from Halloween trick-or-treating:
I haven't touched luminance noise at all, just chrominance. You could easily reduce grain a little if you are grain averse (I am not). The JPEG engine made a waxy mess of this shot, with my wife and daughters faces looking like they belonged in tussauds. Here's a JPEG shot seconds before; its not a 1:1 comparison but you can get an idea:
At ISO 125-320, I see little benefit to using RAW with the intent of post-processing, as the JPEG engine does very well at low ISOs (even if FW1.1 removes more luminance than I'd like now, obscuring detail). Of course, RAW has benefits, even for Q JPEG shooters, and if you want to PP, the option is there.
Something else I'd like to mention, and perhaps I will do a longer write up someday, is that the Q reminds me very much of my Nikon D200. Up to ISO 640, the Q actually performs quite similarly at a RAW level, with even BETTER luminance grain (the D200 sometimes "clumps" it's grain). Chrominance is a little higher than the D200 over ISO320, but with modern NR technology you'd never know. The "feeling" of images is quite similar. This is astonishing to me! A camera I can hold in the palm of my hand, which is essentially equal to a nice DSLR that I dragged around the world a few times. Sweet!