Get the 10-inch dob if you can. I wish I had. It only costs an extra hundred bucks. Here's the Yahoo! discussion group that's dedicated to Orion dobs and their clones: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/skyquest-telescopes/. It's a high-volume astronomy discussion group. Go there and hang out for a while (and check their archives, too). Tons of extremely knowledgeable people hang out there and there is tons of great info to be had with a little searching on your part. Good luck and Merry Christmas!
P.S. If you want to keep those pinpoint images, you're going to have to learn how to collimate a telescope very quickly after getting it. It's kind of a pain at first, but don't let that discourage you. It's a snap once you get used to it. Many purists collimate their scopes every time they take them out.