Need help with LX3 raw, LR 2.3

I don't understand what's going on here. Last weekend I took a bunch of shots capturing raw +jpeg. I upload them into LR and my jpegs look delicious but the raw shots look terrible to me. They are not sharp, the colors look "strange" for lack of a descriptive term and the worst is they look quite distorted even though, from what I understand, LR is supposed to adjust these as they are done in the camera on jpegs. What did I miss here? Please help, newbie with raw here.

The first one is jpeg out of the camera
http://picasaweb.google.com/rguil15/StFrancisville#5317672697215178882

The second is the raw converted to jpeg so I could upload it on picasa
http://picasaweb.google.com/rguil15/StFrancisville#5317672678856859490

I just previewed this and it links you to my pics instead of them showing on my post, I apologize, I don't understand how to fix this.