[jasonkester]

Really? Why would you bother with Canvas at all if you were doing anything (non-rotating) sprite-based?

Canvas' main advantage is that it can render vector graphics. Beyond that it's useful for doing image rotation in a cross-platform way and for manipulating bitmaps. If your game doesn't require those things, I can't think of a reason you'd want to use it in favor of something the browser is so natively good at as laying out image-based scenes.

These days, I'm much more inclined to use 3d-accererated CSS Transforms and Transitions first, then fall back on CSS positioning, then finally Canvas/SVG as a last resort for the few things that can't be accomplished by CSS/HTML.