Anybody who says they need an expensive DSLR in order to take effective, interesting or 'pleasing' shots isn't a good photographer in my opinion.
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Yes, you're absolutely right. But it depends on what you're going to do with it. You can take remarkably good photographs on cheap cameras, but you probably won't be able to blow them up very big (if indeed you wanted to). I'm lucky in that I do have an 'expensive DSLR' and lenses, but that's because it's part of my day job and I sometimes have to enlarge images to up to 1m wide for exhibitions, etc.

One thing that might be helpful is shooting in RAW format which is like a digital negative that you use to produce jpegs or tiffs. I've noticed that a lot of compacts now incorporate this and there's usually software for RAW processing supplied by camera manufacturers if you don't already possess Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. This enables you to tweak images on your computer and bring out detail in shadows, enhance skies, etc. (If anyone wants further advice do please get in touch).

Lastly, you can go to the other extreme with cheap cameras. Last year I built a 10"x8" pinhole camera to do some interiors which had mixed results. That probably cost less than a tenner to build and obviously requires no lens, so the only other financial input is black and white photo paper and chemicals, (not extortionate). Apart from the fact that it's cumbersome, the only drawback is that you can only take one shot if you're outdoors in the middle of nowhere and have no way of loading a new paper negative, (but I'm working on it!).