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The changes made to things like armor were done mostly to solve itemization problems. We didn't make them to nerf Ferals (or anyone). We did them because we started to consider bosses who needed to drop 30 different pieces of armor (or tokens to trade for them or whatever) because classes and even specs were heading off into distinct niches. You'll get something to make up for it. No, you aren't there yet.
We're not entirely happy with the way the Feral ended up in the Burning Crusade. The idea was that you could be a decent tank and a decent melee dps class, so Ferals were something you wanted to bring if you weren't the kind of guild that swapped different people out for every boss. But I don't think "convenience factor" is ultimately a great value to bring to a raid. The problem was we were kind of stuck because if we made Ferals end-game tanks and amazing melee, then the rogues were screwed, because they couldn't go respec to tank or heal.
But now we have a chance to add some new talents, and we'd like for some of them to be the kind that let a druid declare that she is more of a cat or more of a bear. It doesn't have to be shoehorning two whole talent trees into one, but even offering a few choices would go a long way.
It was cool to see those big armor numbers on bears, and we have some plans for how to replace them (and not just with pots).
The death knight gets a lot of attention because it has a lot of catching up to do. There were no death knight in Arathi Basin. Nobody knows how their abilities and power system are going to work so we feel like we have to cover a lot of the ground that was explored literally years ago for some of these other classes.
We will be really disappointed if there aren't bears main tanking Naxx and later raids, and cats that if not consistently as high as rouges, are at least a lot closer than they are now.
Nobody can really compare a level 80 prot warrior to a level 80 feral druid because those individuals don't exist yet. Therefore, we have made almost no attempt to compare their tanking stats except to say "Man, bears could probably use something like Last Stand and something like Thunder Clap" and "Hey, let's make sure bears don't have to scrounge for rare +defense leather or even +resilience in order to be uncrittable." That work is coming.
Bears are able to tank some end-game content even on Live, so I don't think they are orders of magnitude behind warriors. In situations where they struggle, it is sometimes because of crushing blows or mechanics introduced specifically to drive warriors to tank, Shear for instance. I'm going to be tanking Ulduar on my bear, so I'll be the first to complain if I feel the class design isn't up to it.
As far as the previous poster who likes the Feral as the tank / dps hybrid, I don't think anything we're doing will really hurt that. You may be 5-10 talent points behind a tank-focused Feral or a dps-focused Feral but if you liked OTing the bear boss in ZA and then dps'ing on the eagle boss, you should still be great at doing that. The difference is the bear who does spend those talents on threat, mitigation and oh snap abilities instead of +Shred can actually be a raid's primary main tank.
One of the best rogues I know occasionally raided in blue gear or with no talent spec just to remind everyone that player skill often has a much bigger impact on your contribution to a raid than anything else. I know it's easy for anyone to drag out antecdotes that nobody else can validate, but it's worth keeping in mind.
