Great pix, Julian!
With years of hands-on with up to 8x10 film capture and now nearly all digital, I, too, share your observation that digital can equal and in many cases, surpass the resolution of film.
I have on my wall a 12-shot pano of Factory Butte in Utah that would be a royal PIA had I shot it with my 10 inch Cirkut camera. Not only the quality is better, but just processing and printing that 10 inch by 6 feet film was always an adventure and made the darkroom a mess!
With the new image merge in CS3, it's even easier and better than hand stitching!
We're still in the horse-and-buggy era of digital and this will only get better!
I'm printing about 100 prints, mainly 20x30 to 24x26 and longer from the panos right now that rival anything I once got with film. Even the high-res scans from our 645 aren't nearly as sharp as the stuff from our D200 and D2x captures and it takes the added step of scanning.
When you get down to the nuts and bolts, the main reason for large-format in the first place was that was the only way to make large prints at one time. Granted, the lenses today for medium and large format have substantially better than they were in the golden age of both just a few years ago, but Nikon, Canon and the rest did there homework and pushed the envelope. They had to.
If you could get the same image quality from a lens on MF or larger that we get on the current crops of 35 and DX lenses, then there would be no point in shooting the smaller formats. But in reality, there isn't much market to make those lenses.
In the overall scheme of things, though, my Zeiss lenses on the 'blad are awfully nice, and it's hard to get that image quality on anything smaller, but with stitching, it's getting harder and harder to want to shoot film.
Look at Steve Johnson's work with both one-shot and scanning backs. He's on the bleeding edge and is pushing digital limits way beyond what most of us will ever do. But with with what most people have in hand and on their desktops, a little skill and craftsmanship can go a long way in getting into Steve's league.
Go out and shoot some more!