Yes, most of those vacation photos look terrible. Good enough on a beach at midday, but in other lighting conditions they're often under exposed or blurry or backlit or just poorly composed. And in fairness to smartphone cameras, most of those problems are more due to photographer incompetence than device limitations.
Yes, but... a phone you take with you every day is different from an SLR that you take on specific occasions.
Perhaps 20% of pictures I've shot have been on a DSLR, and 80% on phones. By sheer numbers, a really big share of the best shots are from a phone camera. And there's a lot of things that I took pictures of, that there's some rather obvious phone camera penalties from... but at least I have a picture while with a DSLR I would likely not.
It's freeing, too, to not have to choose between "do I lug the big camera today in difficult conditions or get no photos today?"
... I am looking forward to picking up a mirrorless to reduce the barrier a little bit of carrying "the big camera".
I was just on vacation and took some photos with my phone camera, and some with my Nikon D4000 and a pretty basic 55-200 lens.
The phone pics have the benefit of some pretty good automatic processing, ease of use (the thing is already in my pocket), and for typical landscape or portrait stuff, they are just fine.
But there really is no comparison when it comes to "real" bokeh/shallow DOF stuff, not to mention the sheer flexibility offered by a full-fat lens, bigger sensor, and controls that don't have me poking around in touch screen menus. I could even swap to my 35mm f/1.8 if I wanted to shoot in lower light than my phone can do without digital tricks or longer exposure times.
If I were in the market today, perhaps I would go for a mirrorless camera, but as someone decidedly not professional at all WRT photography, I still enjoy having something flexible in addition to using my phone as a decent backup point-and-shoot camera.
