I too am optimistic, except for one small detail:

Cleave is going to die as an on-next-swing ability. This will make me cry.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing like a glyphed, talented Cleave on a tanking warrior. You can charge into a pack of mobs, pop Shield Block and spam TClap/Revenge/Shockwave, and at the same time fire off a 3-target Cleave every two thirds of a second (parry haste, you too shall be missed!) that crits for almost 2000 damage. I can routinely achieve 7500dps tanking the skeleton groups before Marrowgar on 10man mode with my Wrist Chopper, which is more than most dps in my semi-casual group can manage to pump out, and more than my paladin offtank as well. And I haven't even specced deep wounds.

Seriously, with the recent TClap and Revenge buffs, and the Cleave glyph, warrior AoE tanking is in a good enough place. Cleave is roughly a third of my AoE dps, Revenge is another third, and the remaining third is mostly a combination of TClap, Shockwave and Damage Shield, with whatever single-target abilities I manage to hit in between tacked on as an afterthought.

So with Cleave going the way of all on-next-hit abilities, I stand to lose a whopping third of my AoE threat. This worries me greatly. I can only hope the cataclysm class preview later this week will shed some light on general threat and damage output of prot warriors.

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