It is also more likely to get faster in the future, as browsers might implement GPU acceleration for it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for GPU acceleration for SVG, since SVG is not as easily mapped to drawing primitives, like Canvas is.
What about printing? Does canvas maintain resolution independence like SVG? ... I.e., can you print your beautifully drawn graphs and expect to get quality output?
Not exactly. SVG syntax describes a scene, it does not draw on screen directly.
When you animate an SVG image, you update the DOM. The browser then needs to parse the DOM (attributes) again, then clear the screen and draw each element again. This is a lot more work than just mapping the drawing primitives of Canvas to the lower-level GPU functions.
Canvas is pixel oriented whereas with SVG you have a hierarchical document structure to work with.
So if you want to do an online image editor I'd probably go with canvas. For something that needs multiple objects with their own individual event handling - SVG looks a lot easier to me.
SVG is easier out of the box, but you can also use a "scene graph" JavaScript library to create an object abstraction on top of Canvas. In my experience managing the scene graph in JS turns out to be much faster than letting the browser handle it with SVG.
SVG is better supported and has some content creation tools already such as Illustrator and Inkscape. Also: SVG stuff can be used on IE (aparently...) via a flash conversion tool.
