[Marc Sabatella]

There are differences in the way a standalone RAW converter processes an image vs. the way the camera processes the image.

Potentially, true. Although that's not so much an inherent difference in what is possible shooting RAW versus shooting JPEG as it is an accident of the particular camera JPEG engine and RAW converter software you are using. Depending on what camera you use and what standalone software you use, as well as your camera JPEG settings and your own personal tastes, you're as likely to get results from RAW you don't like as much as the results you get from JPEG as the other way around, and more likely still is that the results will be "different" but hard to choose between - there will be things you prefer about each.

When you have a powerful desktop PC and a standalone RAW converter, you will get consistently better quality even if all you do is save down a JPEG straight off Camera Raw, or whatever.

I understand how that is true in theory, but all I can say is, many people on actually performing the comparison find it doesn't hold in practice, and I think that's for the reasons I stated: it depends on the camera, your JPEG settings, the specific RAW processing application, your personal tastes, and probably also the specific image and how it happens to respond to the different demosaicing algorithms and processing defaults.

the K100D series is much better despite having the exact same sensor, but Camera Raw is better still. All JPEG processing is not the same.

Good illustration, because ACR in particular is an application that many performing the experiment find they like *less* than the in-camera processing from the K100D. This illustrates the role personal taste plays.

Anyhow, it is certainly true there is a difference, and in principle, shooting RAW gives you more flexibility such that depending on the software you choose and the processing parameter you use, you *might* get better results than you could in JPEG. But I still say the differences tend to be overstated by reviewers and "experts" who oversimplify the situation and say simple "results from RAW are better than those from JPEG" - most of the potential advantages of RAW are only realized as you do more significant processing, unelss it just so happens that you prefer the results from your particular RAW processor over those produced by your particular camera's JPEG engine.