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Here’s the thing: sure, you’ll get more detail from a larger resolution camera. But, when you print a picture at say, 20 inches or greater, do you look at it from 10 inches away? Most often, pictures that are larger are viewed from longer distances, and the extra detail is lost anyway. If all you’re doing is making 4x6 prints, you don’t often need more than 3 megapixels. If you’re viewing the pictures on a computer, you don’t need much more than the best resolution most computers can handle. A 2560 x 1600 display is only 4.1 megapixels.

In the meantime, the tradeoff for having that huge sensor is a definite loss of sensitivity. There simply isn’t as much light to share among 20 million individual pixels as there is to share among 10 million. If you have to shoot in low light at a slower ISO, it doesn’t matter how many megapixels you have. Your picture will likely be blurry anyway due to the slow shutter speed required with low ISOs.

I’d LOVE to be able to find a point and shoot camera with manual controls (shutter priority, aperture priority and full manual) with a SMALLER sensor (maybe 5-6 megapixels) that had a much better ISO sensitivity than most point and shoot cameras have.

Most often, pictures that are larger are viewed from longer distances,

Viewing distance is 1.5 times the diagonal of the image.
I store all of my final images at 22" x 15" at 300 dpi
in 16 bit Tiffs at 28 megapixels.
I try to do landscapes a 100 ISO.
I've done available light at 25,600 ISO and smoothed the noise.

Here’s the thing: sure, you’ll get more detail from a larger resolution camera. But, ...

One advantage of high megapixel sensors for bird photos is that you can significantly crop an image and still have decent resolution in the crop for printing. I can crop a smaller section of an 18 megapixel image and print it than I could with my old 8 megapixel images. I've found that cropping the same small portion of an 8 megapixel image will sometimes fail pixelation limits for prints (i.e., a small crop of an 8 megapixel image will sometimes have too few pixels to print without pixelation).

Here’s the thing: sure, you’ll get more detail from a larger resolution camera. But, when you print a picture at say, 20 inches or greater, do you look at it from 10 inches away? Most often, pictures that are larger are viewed from longer distances, and the extra detail is lost anyway. If all you’re doing is making 4x6 prints, you don’t often need more than 3 megapixels. If you’re viewing the pictures on a computer, you don’t need much more than the best resolution most computers can handle. A 2560 x 1600 display is only 4.1 megapixels.

One word: Crop.

Higher resolution gives you more options. At 3MP you can print a 4x6 photo of the full frame; at 18MP you can print a 4x6 photo of one face in the crowd. Resolution is certainly overblown in camera marketing, but it counts for something.