What exactly is photo stream?

I have just upgraded to lion on my iMac and had already brought my iphone and ipad up to iso5.  I turned on photo stream and a few other things in icloud, like notes, etc, but not contacts or book marks, I don't want all of them from my imac on my phone so I am waiting to see if Apple will change this in a future version. 
I open iphoto and saw a picture I wanted to move on to my iphone.  So I dragged it to the photo stream on the side bar of iphoto.  When I clicked on photo stream, there were already 12 photos in there.  Some were photos I had deleted from iphoto on my imac earlier today.  I was suprised to see them there and tried to delete them.  They would not delete.  So I did a search here and see a LOT of questions on how to delete photos from photo stream, most with no answer.  I did find where to reset my photo stream, under my name at the top right of icloud when I logged on to icloud  on my iMac.  But when I go to my iphone and look in photostream, inside photos, there is no way to delete a photo.  Also, in itunes on my iMac, photo stream shows up on the left sidebar under recent, but I cannot delete any photos from there.  Like others, there are photos in photo stream that I don't want. 
Then as I think about it, I am wondering, if we are all a bit confused.  Maybe photo stream is JUST a 'pathway' for moving photos between our devices and whatever is in the photo stream, as apples says, sits there for 30 days and then 'falls off' the 'pathway' so to speak, and that the pictures 'live on' in each of our devices, ie the photo library on our iphone and ipad and in iphoto on our home computer (imac, laptop, etc.)  It may be that we are all confusing what photo stream is and is not.  If it is just a mechanisim (pathway in my description) for moving photos between devices, then it would make some sense that the photos will not delete.  They stay there for 30 days to give us time to move them into folders on the i device or the home computer. 
My next question is how do photos get INTO photo stream in the first place?  does every photo we take with either the iphone or ipad, go into photo stream?  And does it also go into the camera roll? 
Michelle

iCloud: Photo Stream
iCloud: Set up Photo Stream
iCloud: What is Photo Stream?
iCloud: Add photos to Photo Stream manually

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    iCloud: Photo Stream FAQ
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