Got it. Turns out my wife did order it from an amazon partner and got it for $425 instead of $445
Bit of a rocky start. The pictures came out very reddish, which turned our tan/white landscape rock brown and made our inside walls very red instead of grayish/creme. Turned the color to muted instead of vivid and that helped. But looking at the pictures it also set the sharpness to soft. Turned on Raw +JPEG to compare and liked the Raw results better. Process with just Picasa now or use Olympus Viewer if we need more control. Will just shoot Raw now.
Video turned out the same or better than our old Canon SD780 video as long as we set it to manual focus in low light to prevent hunting. Need a firmware fix for that! Even if it just turns off auto focus while videoing via a setting. The files are twice as big though, so ordered another 16GB SD card to be sure we have enough space on vacations. The video is obviously nowhere near as good as our Canon HF10, but it's much more portable so will see more use.
Haven't tried super-macro, but I have a 50mm macro lens for my e520, so not really a feature I was waiting for.
The main purpose for the XZ-1 was to provide a more SLR-like performance for our family photos when we don't want to carry around the DSLR. Looking at the quality I think we're happy with the results. No, it is still not the same, but it is a lot closer without being too big. My wife takes most of the holiday snaps, so it made more sense for the XZ-1 than a PEN camera, though I would have liked a PEN better
I think it's an awesome compact overall and am amazed at how small it is for what it does. We used to have a Oly C7070 and that took great pictures. It seems the XZ-1 is a modern equivalent in a much smaller and even better package.
Yeah, funny enough I probably could have purchased a battery separately and still been up on the deal with that dodgy retailer, but I didn't trust them for anything and frankly I'd rather pay more for an honest dealer.
... and ended with a new Olympus. I am happy! 
