This is NOT an anti photoshop rant.
Any image development program name could be inserted but photoshop is the name that is burned into peoples brains.

But.

Photographers in particular ( remember that PS was originally developed for graphic artists and expanded into photo editing ) are simply victims of a hugely successful marketing campaign.
Camera companies advertise and tell the masses that their (insert brand here) camera will give them stunning "pro" images.
The masses adapt to the new technology and cameras in all shapes and forms are suddenly found in greater numbers than a bus full of Japanese tourists at Ayers Rock could ever hope to muster.
A huge percentage of the newly found technology users are disappointed that their ( insert brand here ) camera doesn't do what they expected the advertising said it would.
A very smart marketing person at Adobe recognises a way to extract huge amounts of money from disappointed camera users and says to the Adobe R&D team something like " hey guys, can you make that graphic arts program work on digital photos?".
The answer as we all know is a resounding YES, and so photoshop evolved ( extremely well ) to develop, enhance, manipulate and distort pixels.
Of course, to make the program a true success it had to not only be able to do the job, it had to be marketed so a few skilled users of the program appeared in 30 second ads telling those people that were disillusioned with their (insert brand here) camera and that to get the best images possible they needed to buy photoshop. These ads ( all 30 seconds of them ) of course showed before and after examples of PS at work.
The result was that (history shows it to be so ) huge numbers of people went quack and bought the program and from there a small percentage overall learned how to use it well.
Some of these went on to start and continue to this day to offer you everything from $2.50 video tutorials to multi thousand dollar graduate degree courses to be come a member of the institute of photoshop professionals. The program itself created an entirely new industry that of course needed more marketing.

Fast forward to today and we have skilled photographers using a heavily featured and excellent performing program to create their artworks.
We also still have those dissatisfied camera users that couldn't manage to take a photo who went on to buy an expensive bit of software to fix their shortcomings and failed even further.
These people I feel are the ones who started the "is that photoshopped" question and proceeded to denounce any image that had been enhanced simply because they can't produce the goods. It also doesn't help that there are so many plainly horrible images out there on the net with the inevitable words of " this shot was a bit blurry so I tried to make it look good in photoshop " further adding fuel to the fire of those who simply know nothing about photography in general and image development in particular.
In short, due to advertising, those vast number of people that know zip about photography and even less about image development ( many of those same people tried and failed at both ) have been conditioned by that advertising to accept the image in front of their eyes was created purely by photoshop.

To all those who are asked that question I would say that you are simply a victim of that programs (marketing) success.

And in answer to Dylan's original questions, my internal response is to simply accept it because I know that I will never be able to overcome the power of advertising applied to a gullible brain and my external response is to say that the program I use doesn't have the ability to successfully clone out the sixth finger on the grooms left hand at a Tasmanian wedding but it does a pretty fair job of developing a negative to the point where I am satisfied with the appearance.