I think that it's a bit naïve to think that Canon's R&D team is not fully aware of what exactly their cameras are capable of producing. They have been doing this a long time and I'm sure there's a room full of engineers laughing amongst themselves every time one of these "hidden jewels" are revealed to the masses.
If Canon bombarded us with all of the OEM features presently available, plus all of the things that the Camera's internals/sensor is capable of doing (ML additions included), I believe we would whine more because we would expect more with every camera release.
To me, ML is the old "unlock your GeForce making it a Quadro" trick. Sure the ability is there to make the GeForce graphics card do more than it's advertised/marketed to do, but there are subtle reasons that it's not the same thing as physically having the Quadro graphics card. Just because there is no commercial EOS camera with all of the bells & whistles ML adds to the mix, doesn't mean that Canon doesn't have hardware in the Government or Aerospace sector that we don't have privy to.
Or maybe they have begun to purposefully leave a lot of these features out because the wonderful ML crew are doing what they are doing and what better test bed than us consumers using our cameras that we paid for with our money, providing massive amounts of end user data and feedback. If someone has a problem with a ML feature, the world knows and an update may come out fixing the issue. Canon knows this too but it doesn't cost them a penny to fix because they technically do not support said feature.
So, when 5 different cameras come out over the next x amount of years carrying the DiGiC 6/7/whatever processor, all with varying amounts of features, I won't be surprised in the least to see some polished ML originals in my cameras menu.
For the record, I love ML & I did hack my GeForce back in the day. Long live the hacker!
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