Christmas Tree artifacts aren't a "perceived" drawback. It's real and it's ugly and time consuming and expensive to fix if you don't catch it in rehearsal and block the shot differently or do something with the offending spectrals. I'm not saying this because I'm against the 5d or Canon. It's fact. I also think that the David and Goliath hype is out of control. It's neat, you can shoot pro work with it, it looks really good by itself, looks even better with tons of post. It's small and cheap. Awesome. It has flaws and requires work arounds, too.
It's nice to know that now a $2500 camera can do the job - at least for some. It's also interesting to note that shallow depth field trumps all kinds of perceived drawbacks such as "christmas trees" etc.
And it will be interesting to see this episode when it airs. They are putting it in front of 80 million viewers, I presume it looks pretty good ;-)
In any case, things can only get better from here: New lenses, cheaper chip technology, lower noise, AF while shooting, etc., etc. Yee ha.