There is no answer to your question really - its simply a matter of what quality of image you want to produce and what you are prepared to pay regards differences in quality at the higher end. If you look at it in cost terms then it would be:
Cheap - 35mm film point and shoot
Expensive - digtal point ans hoot with housing and strobe/s
Very Expensive - 35 mm slr with housing and strobe/s
Prohibitively expensive - digital slr with housing and strobe/s
I started with a 35 mm PS - and frankly would have been better throwing the money in the river. Do not go this route if you want decent photos.
Then I move to digital PS and found "photography" - adding strobes really gave me "photographs". I then went to a housed 35mm slr - much superior quality over the digital PS.
I suppose what you really need to assess is what quality you require and then plump for that option.
You can see some of the quality difference between dig and 35 mm at
damnam
the "full frame shots" are 35mm housed and the cropped odd sized photos are digital. You can see the 35mm is better quality even when scanned and reduced to 72 dpi (as is the dig image) but the dig' does give good quality which you can print as great photos upto 8 x 10/12 (its loosing it at after that) in a very easy to learn package.