questions on features

All,
I've just about convinced a friend to rip out an old DB->Web system at their
company and replace it with a linux solution running php and postgres. There
are some issues however. They are running oracle 7.3 on a non-y2k
compliant AIX box, with a non y2k complient front-end cgi. As they are used to
oracle they had some questions about the features of postgres.

1) Does postgres support formatting of columns, say in monetary format. That
is using a select, have postgres format the value of the column in dollars,
ect.

2) Does postgres support the || feature in selectes. That is having a select
look like: select a || '-' || b from fubar; to get output that looks like
1-2
2-3
3-4
ect...

3) When will postgres support: select count(distinct(*)) from fubar; ? I
would guess this falls into sub-selects?

4) Are there any better clients than psql? The psql client is very
unforgiving in that if you mis-type a piece of sql, you cannot tell
psql to abort the current expression.(At least not that I'm aware of)

5) What about a report generator, does postgres have one?

Thanks for your help!

-=pierre