Hi jkat,
You should definitely spend the time to learn about LINQ as it will be "the next big thing" so to speak. Well, one of them anyways. ;)
In some cases it may become your DAL, or may be used "on top of" an existing DAL. In other cases it may be used for something like reporting in your business layer (it works with anything that is IEnumerable<T> based).
Besides LINQ to SQL, there is a LINQ to XML, LINQ to Datasets and I believe there are people working on LINQ bindings for NHibernate. I would expect most people will use the SQL bindings and create their DAL with it, but it's not limited/intended to be just a DAL.
Scott Guthrie's blog has several posts dedicated to examples of using LINQ to SQL. There is also a section on msdn dedicated to LINQ.
I hope that helps.