To what extent SVG is hardware-accelerated entirely depends on the browser. Chrome was quite late to the party of making drawing fast and it often shows (it redeems itself with a fast JavaScript implementation in complex applications that have a lot of rendering and computation). But the raw drawing (of SVG, not canvas) has been a lot faster in IE for quite a while.
I'm working on a graph drawing library at work and for our web product we rely on SVG. In my experience the performance is good enough for our purpose at least (graphs are a thing that becomes more or less unreadable as the number of entities go up, so useful graphs tend to only have a few hundred nodes/edges on the screen at most; and that's still effortlessly possible with 60 fps interaction). Where it gets annoying is that especially Google clearly doesn't really care for SVG. It's not used (much; or only with static images) in the top 500 sites or whatever they look at for optimising their browser, so they frequently break things with rendering that come to bite our customers.
Google was first with a decent SVG and they were leapfrogged. But Chrome is the most used browser, and together with Safari, WebKit leads big time over the shrinking IE and FF portion. I and my clients can't afford to do entirely different things per browser.
My area of data visualization involves e.g. time series, where a decent zoom/pan implementation and a few years of stock or weather data means that you're juggling DOM elements in and out to keep frame rate, but adding/removing DOM elements revolver style is even more expensive, introducing janks. I also tend to work on exploratory vis where it's useful to scatter all points, tween them (not as a gratuitous effect but for object constancy, to help the user keep context) etc.
Interestingly it's also Google who wants you to get minimal with payload size. Yet it's OK for them if you roll your own speedy version of SVG by bundling a 100k of three.js or make your own text rasterizer, essentially reimplementing browser functionality.
Actually, Opera was pretty much the only browser with useful SVG support for a long time. All other browsers plodded along with little more than basic shapes.
I'm working on a graph drawing library at work and for our web product we rely on SVG. In my experience the performance is good enough for our purpose at least (graphs are a thing that becomes more or less unreadable as the number of entities go up, so useful graphs tend to only have a few hundred nodes/edges on the screen at most; and that's still effortlessly possible with 60 fps interaction). Where it gets annoying is that especially Google clearly doesn't really care for SVG. It's not used (much; or only with static images) in the top 500 sites or whatever they look at for optimising their browser, so they frequently break things with rendering that come to bite our customers.