Finally? Forgive me, but I can't really see the need for CSS to pull this off on its own. With gradient text you're not looking to convey information (or at least, no more than the words would convey with any other css-available text effect), you're looking for a visual effect. Something that images handle rather well.
Or if you're looking for something that scales nicely with screen resolution or whatnot, SVGs. I'm really looking forward to vector graphics getting better support in browsers - half the time we used bitmap images we really mean something else.
