Canvas itself does not support text; there are various hacks to, e.g., port PS fonts to canvas, but it's a really ugly scene. Other methods include overlaying HTML text via CSS and server-side image rendering fonts. It's all really ugly.
Is there any word on whether other browsers will be implementing this in the future? It's what's keeping me from using canvas today, and partially what's keeping me from writing a certain app I've been thinking about for a little while.
I've tested some of my SVG demos with FF 3 and they run much faster than with FF 2 (I think that's due to Cairo being integrated into Firefox 3). Opera and Safari are very fast compared to FF 2, too.
As for feature completeness I agree with you. The Firefox SVG team is very small and not funded by the Mozilla corporation (at least that was the case last year when I talked to one of its members) - the SVG standard, on the other hand, is HUGE.
I'm using it for a simple web app, testing in FF2/FF3/Safari, seems to work fine... there are some annoying bugs in the implementation (the kind that have been open for years), and inconsistencies between Safari and FF, but nothing I couldn't work around so far.
We started by using graphviz to generate svg, but then couldn't find any decent in-line svg viewers. Do you know of any non-java applet inline svg viewers?