Include an image within auto the_excerpt?

Yes, you can do that, but you’ll need to tweak the <?php the_excerpt(); ?> function. This is a good article on how to do that:

http://aaronrussell.co.uk/legacy/improving-wordpress-the_excerpt/

To sum up the article in case it goes away, put this in your theme’s functions.php file:

function improved_trim_excerpt($text) {
        global $post;
        if ( '' == $text ) {
                $text = get_the_content('');
                $text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
                $text = str_replace('\]\]\>', ']]>', $text);
                $text = preg_replace('@<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>@si', '', $text);
                $text = strip_tags($text, '<img>');
                $excerpt_length = 80;
                $words = explode(' ', $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
                if (count($words)> $excerpt_length) {
                        array_pop($words);
                        array_push($words, '[...]');
                        $text = implode(' ', $words);
                }
        }
        return $text;
}
remove_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'wp_trim_excerpt');
add_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'improved_trim_excerpt');

Note this line, this is where you’re telling the function to strip all tags except <img> tags. You could add others if you’d like to include paragraph tags or whatever:

$text = strip_tags($text, '<img>');

Then call the_excerpt(); as usual in your theme files (index.php, single.php etc).

Best of luck!