Hi, that seems like a great price, here in AU the RRP is AU$829 (currently US$645), although probably a bit less in the shops.
I have its predecessor, the LX2, and like it very much. In fact, it will probably be my only travel cam for short (< 1wk) work trips. I find that the OIS works very well, in fact contrary to popular opinion it's very useful at wide angles, where you can use it for hand-held night shots. I mostly have the camera set on "P" and use the joystick to adjust exposure compensation as I wish and to avoid blowing highlights. I've used aperture priority a couple of times, but with minimum f-stop of f/8 it doesn't really make a lot of difference (but it may well do with yours, with lens speed of 2.0-2.8 vs mine with 2.8-5.6 at the long end). I've been shooting RAW for the most part, which means lots of room to adjust in Photoshop but the RAW files are very large (20 Megs) so I had to buy a 4Gig card for it...
I almost always use it in 16:9 mode. With the 24mm wide end on yours (vs 28 on mine) you will get some awesome shots!
JohnR
