do the SE's care? i've seen it said before here that subdomains are treated the same as a normal domain but then in another thread some dude called spraven stated quite emphatically that they are given less weight by the SE's. I apologise in advance as i assume this question has been asked before but i really would love a definitive answer. Thanks.
You'll never get a definitive answer because there are so many search engines and they all run their algos in different ways the search engines will never give you a definitive answer to what's in their algos because that leaves them open to exploitation (ie spam) what is a definitive answer today may be irrelevant after the next update, whatever and whenever that may be for each search engine FWIW my blog was on a subdomain until recently and it did very, very well.
As what sarahk has mentioned. No one except the Search Engine engineers can answer your question 100%. However, it is widely believed that Search Engine indexes individual pages. Therefore, there are no difference if yours is a domain or subdomain...