I want to chime in to say that the lack of a common image format (and displays, for that matter) with true support for high-range photos is really holding back digital photography in my humble opinion.
Nah, it's the camera makers that are holding things back by sticking to proprietary formats and in some cases obfuscating them. There's OpenEXR, HDR, and DNG (the last of which is a true RAW format). The big issue with creating a true interchange format is that RAW files don't have proper color information for all pixels (they instead have red, green, or blue data for any given pixel, sometimes deliberately blurred, etc.) and interpolating the values to produce reasonably nice faux color for each pixel is actually very hard and the algorithms the different companies use is presumably protected by patents.
