The RAW format is little more than a two-dimensional grid with the values from every cell of your CCD. Everything with a CCD has the potential to produce a similar file, whether the manufacturer exposes it to the end-user or not. It often requires less processing logic (but a lot more memory) to produce a RAW file than a full-blown JPEG. I had the opportunity a while back to briefly operate a professional-grade telescope (owned by my school, not mine [sigh]) and a RAW-like file is pretty much all you could get out of it: the rest is post-processing. On digital cameras there is quite a bit of metadata thrown into the mix, as a digital telescope doesn't really need to bother with things like depth of field, or apperture, or even focus. The resulting file is then compressed with some form of lossless compression and that's basically what you get as a RAW file.
It does not make sense to edit a RAW file as this is not the image itself, but rather all the ingredients for it along with the recipe. When you "edit" a RAW file, you merely change to the recipe, not the ingredients (the data). You don't "crop" a RAW file, you merely tell the RAW file viewer to crop when showing it to you and you can always restore the original image after that. Data is never being thrown out as the two-dimensional grid with the original values is always there and is never changed once recorded. For this reason the RAW format allows you to do things like "restore" colour information in a black-and-white shot during post-processing.
Your camera doesn't want to change the receipe for the RAW for some reason and has instead rendered the RAW into a JPEG for you. This, however, is only useful (or meaningful) if you will be printing your photos straight from the camera, without first downloading them into a computer. My guess is that your camera is rendering RAWs into JPEGs for you because it cannot print RAW files on a printer directly.
I hope this helps you in some way.