It's not brain surgery. If one has extensively used other preceding Canon cameras (in all sorts of conditions) that produced the smoothing waxy look, and then sees examples of that same look on a new Canon camera ... it's natural to be suspicious and skeptical. At one time there wasn't many other choices, Canon had a lock on the FF DSLR ... that time has passed.
Marc,
Not disagreeing with you, but I do think that the context of experience you describe does have an influence. If you shoot a lot of people shots, and you consistently see what you describe as a waxy look, then this sort of comment for the 5DMkII may be more apropos. I shoot a lot of people also, but most are not close-up portraits, so the waxy issue never really comes into play. And I do not see it in other non-people things, so that makes it a bit harder to pin down. (Macro shots in good lighting of something like flowers or plants does not render them waxy looking, from my experience. All shots do tend to require more sharpening, and maybe that is the element that strikes me more.)
Further, my biases against Canon is more around some colors, and whenever I see files, that tends to capture my attention faster. (A good example, even from off-hand shots linked to above comparing the 5DMkII and the D700 jump right out at me.) I think I understand what you are interpreting. For whatever reason, it does not seem quite as obvious to my eyes, and some of the initial observations were more influenced by OOF areas. Not saying that there was not a more aggressive smoothing, as there probably is, and that can create that more lifeless look at times.
Again, I am not trying to defend the look from these shots, or from Canon in general. As you point out, for the longest time they were the only real game going. For a lot of my shooting, I was happy to be able to get rather decent shots in extremely challenging lighting conditions. Whenever NR was applied, things did get more lifeless or waxy looking, and much more so with the Canon files than anything else, so that could be an underlying quality of the files and how things break down. The resolution starts out good. Once you start to pull out luminance noise, details start to break down to a very smoothed look, more than I see with other files. Perhaps that is what is going on, and why I thought it worth looking at RAW files.
LJ
P.S. LCT's reposts look more than acceptable to me. They do not have the pore etching look one may get from shooting the same model with stronger sidelight and a more "clinical" rendering lens, like a Zeiss, but the softened skin looks more like what beauty retouchers tend to prefer, I think.