Let me first thank everyone for some really great feedback. I really do appreciate it. With that said, it sounds like I have under estimated the amount of effort/skill/experience required to implement the functionality I spoke of in an embedded system. My past experience with any type of mcu is limited to PIC's and its interaction with fpga's and eprom's. I do have a great deal of experience with pc/unix/linux based programming, but never trying to (if possible) "port" those programs to an mcu implementation.
Ok quick summary: So, it is clear that C++ is not going to get me any closer to a mcu implementation. Sounds like C is the way to go, and whatever mcu I decide to go with should have a compiler for it.
I agree with the one comment that it would most likely be the path of least resistant to use a camera and mcu that can both use a type of flash for the memory.
I would also agree that the jpeg format has a great deal of overhead associated with it, simply due to the compression algorithm. Which, of course, is why it is desirable for such applications as digital cameras to save CF storage space. However, if possible, I'm hoping to over come this bottleneck with a beefy mcu.
Oh, and in my past posts when I referred to "my application", I was speaking of the C++ desktop level implementation I have already completed that performs the functionality I described. This is complete, reads jpeg files, performs some operations, etc. I'm not exactly sure what the "magic digital picture frame" project is, but this basically to sample colors and patterns in the image and then draw some conclusions based on that information.
Moving forward: I concede that I have lots of learning to do in this area, and you all have already begun to school me (thanks). I was hoping that by describing what I'm trying to do, some folks might suggest a certain MCU that might make things less painful for me. For example, if such a mcu platform exists that has a nice simple, almost abstracted interface to some compact flash...that would be great! Of course the interface is a standard, often times in console level programming these things are abstracted for the programmer. With that said, please correct my above if I've stated anything incorrectly, and if you have more suggestions, ideas, etc. please shoot them my way. Especially if you can recommend a particular mcu for this application.
Thanks again for your time.
--Ryan