A lot of people recommend something called "noise ninja." I don't really have a clue because I never shoot digital at high ISO, but you ought to look into it.
I try shooting at low ISO, but if there is noise I find the reduce noise and despeckle filters (Photoshop CS2 here) to work pretty good.
or you can use surface blur which doesn't touch edges, or you could use layers with a blur masked on them. THere's a million different ways to do noise reduction in photoshop, and none work well for every image. THe trick is finding out which do.
Yeah, you got a point. I guess you could use selective blur and keep the edges sharp, or use Garbz' approach
Noise Ninja II does a great job and maintains sharpness. Great tool. I use it and the PaintShop Pro noise reduction tool.
If you get the exposure correct, you'd be surprised at how little noise there is in an image. If you zoom in you'll see it but in print probably not - unless you are outputing to a pretty large print.....