Lotek's got it right. Optical zoom is very important. The higher the resolution, the more you can "crop", enlarging just a portion of your image, without losing too much image quality. Cameras without good optical zoom depend on digital zoom. digital zoom is like holding a magnifying glass in front of your TV. It's bigger, but looks crappy. Optical zoom is what you have with a zoom lens on a film camera. You get it close, then commit it to pixels.

Even low cost cameras are starting to use memory cards that can be very large. 128 MB is not uncommon.