Indeed, image quality is really down the the actual hardware components involved, like the sensor and lens arrays (or lack thereof), though other factors can play a role too (jpeg compression, ewww yuuuuuck!). You could have a camera that captures 30, 40+ MP images that suffer from terrible artifacting - sure, the images churned out are enormous with dimensions that match the manufacturer's claims exactly, but when you consider the resultant quality of the image up close at 1:1 scale, you feel underwhelmed because it looks so bad (lol).
Rule of thumb: There's no way that a company that manufactures both types of products will allow a cheaper all-in-one model to dethrone a higher-priced, dedicated model with regard to performance. That would be strategic suicide. :v
