I think unless your post processing skills are intermediate, you don't get much benefit from raw, at least until you know what you are doing. The challenge I noticed is that the profiles in Lightroom are pretty horrible compared to most in camera JPG's so you really need to be at a position to get the best out of them. This tends to apply to a lot of areas like sharpening and noise reduction.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying don't shoot raw, I'm just saying that the results you get initially may not be much better than the JPG.