For photo editing, colours, balance, exposure etc and a better crop facility than Photoshop Lightroom is fantastic, I can process a full festival weekends photos quickly and easily, the option to export straight to Flickr or even my own website is simply brilliant, its a fast and relatively easy photo editing package. If however you want to get ultra creative, use layers adn get really into the more artistic/creative side of photo editing then Lightroom isn't good, photoshop (even Elements) has more power for doing big things to photos. Horses for courses, I use Lightroom as my day in day out package, I can get through 2000+ photos in a day with ease, but if I want to be creative and stich 8 photos together into a landscape, then make it into some sort of colour pop or create a band poster Photoshop gets dusted off. With my main type of photography being gig I could live without Photoshop and just use Lightroom, but every so often the bug bites and I'm off into layers and trying to make what I can see in my head
LOL
Hope that helps a little.