Hi,
There is a 800 pound gorilla in the equation, it is called white balance.
The other point may be that colour is decided by a combination of camera profiles and the colour filter array (CFA). You can make the CFA very orthogonal, yielding very saturated colours by default, or you make them have a lot of overlap reproducing the characteristics of human vision. Think Velvia or Ektachrome.
Canon's CFA design may work well under a lot of luminance conditions and Canon's WB algorithms may be good for finding a white balance for pleasant colour with a great variety of light sources.
Some other combinations of CFA-design, White Balance and colour profiles would perhaps deliver great colour for landscape, like Velvia, but offer awful colours for skin tone, also like Vevia.
Best regards
Erik
Recently photographer told me that Canon digital SLRs have richest quality color when compared to similar Nikon and Sony cameras. I have also read this on line. My DXO program provides camera sensor choices as presets. The differences are noticeable.
This seems strange since a raw file is just an array of photon counts. Are Canon pixels able to collect more photons?
Or is this just mythology?