Actually fairly similar to the Canon T3i, especially since the new Magic Lantern was released in December.
There should be a T4i out soon, as Canon has been blowing out the refurb bodies from Canon Direct, which is usually a pretty good sign. If we are lucky ML will work with the new version day 1.
The T3i was about $530 yesterday with 20% off on refurbs.
I was going to jump in and mention the T3i when you were talking about the 5DII issues recently. The T3i does allow autofocus while shooting, doesn't dump down the resolution, has the articulating screen. With ML you can actually pre-set a near and far focus along with the focus steps, so that it will stop exactly on a mark short of infinity. It has the digital magnification of 3x to 10x while shooting, either for focusing or to record. ML allows a shutter speed of 1/48, etc.
I'll have to go through the Nikon specs a bit more. Hopefully we get better downsampling using all of the sensor lines, etc, either here, with the T4i, or with ML some day.
Maybe at that price ML can totally replace the Canon firmware and read out from the chip? Wishful thinking I suppose, as they are only using the SDK procedure calls. But if we could get raw off any of these chips, and enable HDMI out on these, or just a better codec we would be fine. These chips are quite adequate, and the T3i images are already beautiful, really the same as the 7D.
Michael