"Every ability we have other than lacerate is on a CD..."

As opposed to, say, Warriors where every ability other than Devastate is on a cooldown. Or Paladins where every ability is on a cooldown. Or Death Knights, who have few attacking abilities with direct cooldowns, but none of them are really spammable.

"Thrash is meh, and swipe just plain sucks for aoe threat (it should do more aggro than thunderclap, dnd, or consecration b/c other than thrash, it is the only aoe tool we have. all the other tanks have multiple)"

Oh, well, other than Thrash. Which means you can hit every mob in melee range every other GCD, since both Thrash and Swipe are on six second cooldown. (Unless they share a cooldown; I've no post-80 druids). And you've also got Berserk (admittedly not an every trash pack ability) and Glyph of Maul.

Don't get me wrong; Druid AoE threat is pretty bad compared to the other tanks, but it does everything it needs to. Any groups that should be AoEd down will die before it matters that you lost threat.

"Oh, and let's not forget that druids have less mitigation/avoidance than other tanks. Our dodge % should be about equal to other tank's dodge+parry+block % (maybe just dodge+parry since Savage Defense is almost like block). OR, if Blizz intends for us to have less mitigation, we should have more health to make up for it."

Okay... It was my understanding that bears were looking at 40% or so dodge in heroic gear. My warrior is in the 30% range for parry + dodge (or would be if I didn't keep reforging the parry and dodge to mastery); that's my only heroic tank at the moment. I've been hearing that with the current patch (bug or no) bears are at something over 65% armor mitigation which isn't giving up any ground to the plate tanks, especially when bears have talents that take an additional percentage of damage off the top.

And as far as more health; you don't want to be the mana sponge. The only guildie who I know has spent time healing heroic PUGs has averred that bears are probably the easiest tanks to heal, with less total health being acceptable to him as a healer (for what it's worth, his order was Druid-Paladin-Warrior-DK.

Of course, I'm still looking at all this from the perspective of heroics, not raids, and the way things scale in raids may make a difference; for example, Savage Defense likely won't scale as well against raid bosses as the other tanks' masteries (although I confess that that evaluation isn't even up to back of the envelope quality).