The biggest difference between someone shooting snapshots with a camera on their phone, and a professional photographer is not the equipment, although that it is also a pretty big difference. Modern smart phones can take some pretty impressive pictures, no question about it. No, the biggest difference is photo editing. The average tourist shooting a camera phone snapshot of the kids mugging Goofy at Disneyworld is not going to do anything with that picture except maybe show it off to friends and family on Facebook, and nowadays it will probably live on the phone forever. He or she is probably not going to edit it to make it better.
A professional photographer, however, is usually shooting in camera RAW mode. When you look at a RAW file straight-out-of-camera (SOOC), it's really not very impressive. It looks flat and lifeless. But hiding in that file is a tremendous amount of data, and that data can be used to do amazing things to help the picture capture reality, and sometimes even improve upon it. SOOC my RAW files are on the order of 75MB each. A camera phone picture might be 5-6MB, although some do go higher. And I can convert my RAW file to something you could print the size of a wall without it looking bad up close. The detail is amazing, and it is one of the main reasons I bought the camera I have. I definitely can't order a pizza or check my email on it, though, so it does have its limitations.
There are self-styled photographic "purists" who condemn photo editing and yearn for the old days of film, when what you shot was what you got, assuming you had the talent and equipment to get it. These people are stuck in another age and not equipped to handle the modern one. Technology has made huge leaps forward in photography and it has truly revived a dying art. Embrace it. Technology is your friend.
There are also those who claim that photo editing is dishonest and doesn't reflect reality. Hogwash. One of the greatest photographers this country has produced, Ansel Adams, was very talented at capturing perfect light at perfect moments. But he was far more talented in the dark room, than behind the camera. Photo editing wasn't much in his days, but he pushed what he had to the edge of its capability and advanced the photographic art by doing so. Imagine the things he could have done with a modern digital camera and Photoshop. I'm sure he would have pushed both to the edge of their capability.
There are others who dismiss any pictures that look better than their pictures with the statement, "Must be Photoshopped." In fact, "Photoshopped" has become an easily understood word in our society, and it is usually not used in a complimentary fashion. For example, I have heard someone make this statement, "That's a really great picture. It must have been Photoshopped." It is insulting and it is meant to be. And it often comes from a thinly veiled envy.
Thanks to technology and computers, the art of photography has evolved, and it has done so for the better. Now great photography entails both talent with a camera, and talent with a computer. Those who are best at the latter do so in a way that enhances the former without being overtly obvious about it. Certainly, there are those who push the computer aspect beyond credibility, and at some point the work becomes more digital art than photography, but it is still art.