We only recognize two types of classes:

Can respec to fulfill a different role = hybrid.
Cannot respec to fulfill a different role = pure.

The roles are tank, healing and damage.

In our design, having two healing trees (priest) or half a tanking tree (druid) or three dps trees (DK) does not put these classes in different categories of hybridness. A hybrid is a hybrid.

It's the roles that your class lets you do that is important, not how those roles are organized into talent trees. The paladin is one way to organize the trees (a tanking tree, healing tree and melee dps tree) but not the only way. However, there is a reason we don't do this for every class -- it would be boring.

IMHO, the WoW community has a tendency to want to categorize things too much.

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Q u o t e:
For DPS:
Pures will be slightly ahead of Hybrids, because they have nowhere else to go if they lag behind.

For all tanking specs
All tanks should be roughly equitable. All are able to tank all content at the proper progression stage. Each tank will have slightly more advantage on different bosses.

For all healing specs
All healers will be useful in most situations. All raids could take none of any healer and not feel underpowered because of it. All raids could take two of any healer and not feel underpowered because of it. Healers will obviously be more diverse in terms of style, but should be fairly equitable in the sense that diversity of Healer spec is encouraged via complexity of boss scripts.

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Yeah, that's not too bad if you don't overanalyze it.

The only reason we treat healers as slightly more specialized than tanks, even though all can do all roles, is that raids have more healers than tanks.

I know many of you disagree with the OP, and that's fine, but this issue comes up often enough that I wanted to repeat it once again so it was easy to reference.

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Q u o t e:
You have not made tanks any less specialized in practice. Block still reigns supreme for certain *cough* encounters. Bear scaling is very specialized and makes them unique, easily geared to content, and arguably too good at survival in-general compared to the rest. Paladins still bring the best raid buffs of any tank (barring commanding shout) as well as the highest threat and snap threat by a wide margin.

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You're talking about differences among the tanking classes. Yes, there are differences. Some of those are going to be bigger factors in some fights than others. But every class can still tank every encounter within a reasonable degree of success than each others.

Your "wide margin of snap threat" might be a big deal for you. For others it's the difference in whether the tank can apply the Demo Shout debuff, or how much mana it takes to heal that class, or whether the damage is spikey or smooth, or whether the class requires a high degree of skill, or how easy it is to gear, and so on. It's not ever going to be identical as long as the classes have different abilities and stats, so our goal is just to get things close enough. "Close enough" is very subjective so it doesn't surprise me that it varies a lot from player to player.

By contrast, if we had followed the BC-style of tank specialization (which we started to do when we first announced the DK), it would be something like this:

Warrior - best single-target tank.
Paladin - best tank for large groups.
Death knight - best tanks for highly magical fights.
Druid - best off tank, since the player can dps with largely the same spec when not needed.

Then even 10-player raids would probably need to keep a stable of all 4 tank classes around and switch people out (or at least flip specs) from encounter to encounter. I know that design is appealing to some players because at least they would get to feel very important for some fraction of the encounters. But it just doesn't work well with our LK philosophy of giving players a lot more flexibility in who they bring to a raid, which we ultimately think is more important. In LK, almost every player with an interest in raiding can manage it. Even if you are interested in cutting-edge raiding, almost every player can manage that too, regardless of spec, with just a couple of exceptions (maybe Arms and Subtlety at the moment). If you want to feel important, my advice is be a dependable player who does yourjob and doesn't cause a ton of drama for your raid. Again too much of the community, IMHO, wants to be important because they bring a mandatory buff or are declared "the best" spec or class in their role.

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Q u o t e:
Care to give any insight on what raises a red flag of not being "close enough" then? Perhaps some of the posters that are more disgruntled with the current tanking balance would be able to better articulate their arguments to the rest of us if they had more of a glimmer of what it is that catches your attention to nerf this DR over here, or buff this Avoidance over there, or etc etc.

Or are we just going to get a "when it feels not close enough" :P

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A few red flags that come to mind from this expansion are DKs on Sartharion, DKs and druids tanking pre-nerf General Vezak, druids tanking Thorim in PvP gear, and warriors tanking heroic Abub adds with lots of block. The paladin on the 3.2 PTR tanking multiple Patchwerks at once felt broken, but that situation almost never happens in "real life." (And we did nerf AD a little since that test.)

A counter example would be say a DK offtank on Malygos -- Death Grip is really nice to have, and it's arguably easier with a DK, but not so much so that other comps feel hopeless. Another would be a warrior tanking Stormcaller Brundir. The interrupts are nice and the quick movement can get you out of AE as needed. That's a good match for tank abilities and a particular encounter, but it doesn't cross the line. As I said, it's going to be subjective.