For his gear.
It is not 100% certain that it would be the case for everyone else. Sorry, I am just trying to drive home this point.
That being; that there is not, within reason, a 'universal hard and fast rule' for Arcane.

Wow, I just got a chance to run the latest Rawr (2.1.17) with my current gear to compare 53/18 to the new arcane spec and it shows (with glyph changes) an increase of about 700dps! I was assuming there might be a small increase, but that is pretty amazing. As soon as I can get my buddy inscripter to make me the glyphs I am going to test this out on live.

Not really, because you get 19 spellpower for 16 intellect. Also, in something closer to best in slot gear the value of intellect goes down. In quickly guessed at best in slot gear in Rawr, I'm getting 1 Spellpower=1.4 dps and 1 Intellect=1.29. Spirit is still fairly bad at 0.22 dps.

Edit to reply to Kel S'jet: Yeah, sorry, trying to show that spirit does not seem in general to be all valuable, although it is worth picking up where you can.

Rawr already does what you describe. The only reason Spirit has ANY value for dps, is that it gives you more mana, which you can turn into more damage.

Since there's such a dependence on mana from Arcane mages, and you still need the 10% spell crit debuff, could an ideal raid loadout be one arcane mage and one frost mage with water elemental? Water elemental provides such a massive amount of mana I would think your overall raid dps (and healer sustainability) might be higher.

At this point I think that Frost is so far behind Fire/FFB/Arcane it is a detriment to the raid to bring along a Frost mage. Its like pre-WotLK bringing an Affliction lock over a Destro lock for Malediction, it just wasn't worth it.

At this point, with replenishment, the ONLY class that will run into any mana issues is the Arcane mage and we have a few tools to manage our mana with so it shouldn't be an issue. 18/53/0 and 57/3/11 will probably be the combination you see with the Fire mage getting the Arcane mage's focus magic.

This is a very valid point. I am somewhat lucky since I have a large say in the what the loadout for our raids should be. To this effect, I have, perhaps selfishly, assigned one of our mages to be our "token frost mage" (though in my defense, the selected mage is a hardcore frostie and actually enjoys the role of being a 'utility specced mage'). Our other mage is our token fire mage. During any raid, apart from myself, at least one of the two will be present (most of the times its both of them) ensuring the scorch/winter's chill debuff is up. Naturally we bathe the frost mage in praises and cajole him to raid as often as possible, since he will naturally keep up the debuff and so the fire mage will not have to scorch, plus providing the raid wide mana trickle, it is definitely worth it. His awesome AoE also comes handy, e.g. he can pretty much solo nuke down decimated gluth adds etc.

True, it may not be the 'ultimate min-maxing of your raid', but honestly, if I can bake my cake and eat it too at the loss of a couple of hundred raid wide DPS on patchwerk (who we insta-gib anyway), then so be it. Especially if at the end of the day, everyone (including the token frostie) is happy.

Couple this with the fact that our hunters will be going Survival in this patch (hence an added mana regen source), you can see where my excitement for Arcane is coming from.

EDIT:
I do not share this view since I find it somewhat tunneled. If you already insta-gib patchwerk in 3 mins with a frost mage in the raid, yes, by converting the frost mage to fire you will perhaps kill patchwerk in 2mins 40 seconds instead.. But at that point who really (and I mean really) cares?
I completely disagree that having a frost mage in the raid is a 'detriment'. I would suggest that you look at raids as a whole, i.e the entire process, instead of min-maxing your career around patchwerk. I mean come on, he is a simple boss, a dps/healing check. Once you've done him, you move on to more interesting encounters.
A raid is a living entity with a variety of gear levels within it. The situations it is in vary widely. Blanket statements such as the one you make are rarely helpful. Please note, I am not saying you are outright false (that would be a blanket statement), all I am saying is that the issue is more complicated then that, and that 'black-white' rules rarely apply.

For example, yes, if you are the only mage in the raid, then you should perhaps not be frost since you will be more useful otherwise. If your raid is struggling with entry level content, then perhaps you should not be frost. If there is already a frost mage in the raid, then yes, you should perhaps not be frost since you do not bring anything more to the table. Either way, the pattern continues, that being, that there are a lot of "ifs" to consider.

It's all about the 'ifs', there is no blanket.

Has anyone seen the AB glyph today? I don't see any in AH, and it wasn't listed w/ inscription trainer in IF. Or is it learned now?

sorry, it duplicated

Patch notes said it would be on some trainers. Try the trainer in Dalaran.

Last I knew, the Water Elemental's mana regen was considered trivial. Has the consensus changed on this? I have argued extensively against Frost's survivability being counted against its DPS, but if the utility it provides in the form of eliminating the need to Scorch, WE mana regen, and improved AOE DPS is actually considered valuable to the raid at this time, that could certainly balance some DPS reduction. Just, last I knew, people didn't think these contributions were really significant.

I disagree. When you're learning more challenging content, every bit of dps help as long as you're not compromising raid survivability. For example, on sartharian +3, an extra 10 seconds between drake deaths makes a big difference between a kill and a wipe. With the current content, there's really no need to get the extra survivability of frost or the mana return from WE. Because of that, I would consider being frost a slight detriment to the raid because you're not doing your optimal DPS.

EDIT: A 18/53/0 fireball build or 0/53/18 FFB build would probably be best for the 10% crit buff to the raid.

The mana can be valued more or less depending on group composition and the length of the fight.

In 25s the extra mana is not generally noticed due to the replenishment being active on nearly all members of the raid, but it does, as LordBEEF pointed out, about 50% of replenishment for about 50% of the fight. The issue is that most fights end so quickly that the extra mana is never needed and the extra mana is wasted on healers and DPS with full (or nearly so) mana bars. However long fights or fights with mana drains (sapphiron and KT come to mind), the contribution becomes meaningful. So I'd say it depends heavily on the raid leader (and how often your Rets and SPs die) as how much value gets placed on redundant mana restoring mechanisms.

So after a bit of testing, it seems like the following macro is nice:

/castsequence Arcane Blast, Arcane Blast, Arcane Blast, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage

Basically just spam one button the whole time, making sure to hit Arcane Barrage immediately after the 4th Arcane Missile.

Can this macro be improved?

Eh, its mana isn't completely negligible. For my gear, which is mix naxx10/25 for the most part with quick napkin math, it comes out to over 100mp5 while he's down, which for most naxx encounters comes out to somewhere between 55-70% of a fight. So even taking a worst case, without use of cold snap - if he's down for half the fight exactly, he's giving the raid 50mp5. That isn't too bad as side utility on the talent.

I do believe that we are not there yet.

On its own, the primary mage in a raid cannot truly be frost. In that respect, the spec is still broken.
However, my point was more along the lines of if you already have 2 mages in the raid, and a 3rd one comes along and wishes to raid as frost, he will not be turned away from one of my raids (obvious restrictions apply, e.g he has to actually be a good player etc).
Now, what about the value of AoE?
True, the value of AoE is still in a holding pattern around "makes trash go quicker and is pretty good for certain encounters eg Gluth or Noth". However, is this enough? Not if you are the only mage in the raid. That still doen't mean that having a frost mage in the raid means an automatic insta-fail of epic proportions. There will still be moments where you will feel like your presence as a frost mage is justified (i.e you will not just be a dud in the raid). Its just that those moments are few and far between. Though when they do occur, they are very noticeable. Ever seen a full frost mage on Noth's adds? I will be lying if I said it wasn't a sight to envy.

You cannot disagree with a point that is the same as yours. Look harder at exactly the point you made, there is a big "IF" in there. My point, as I emphasized to what I believed was clear enough (though in hindsight I should have perhaps bolded, underlined and bordered it to help the folks out there who choose to 'skim' read posts rather than 'actually' read them), is that there is no "one rule to rule them all". I did not say "Frost mages are mandatory for every raid all the time" since that would have been a blanket statement (which is what I am precisely saying does not exist).

My post was far more nuanced then that. Give it due justice and try and understand its point.

Water elemental has scaled pretty nicely with gear, so on my moonkin it's worth pretty much the same as blessing of wisdom. (120 mp5 with 20,000 mana pool)

So the equation becomes, how much more dps can an arcane mage do with an extra blessing of wisdom if it lets them skip an evocation. Then do the same for warlocks who can skip some amount of life tap. Hunters can skip some amount of time in viper, etc.

Ultimately I highly doubt it's worthwhile for current content because the fights are so short, but it's something worth keeping on the radar.

I mentioned this above, and Zeldyrr also elucidated, but I think it bears repeating: there is a qualitative difference between "Arcane Shatter" and a Shatter Combo. Shatter Combos rely upon an in-game mechanic (travel time) that is not at odds with any tooltip text. "Arcane Shatter" is more akin to the problem of cheating a third charge out of a Fingers of Frost proc: it directly contradicts the tooltip, and involves beating data travel time, not spell travel time. And you'll find that a number of us Frost Mages have argued that FoF should be fixed to deal with the third charge problem.

Do you really want your spec to work around a mechanic that involves deliberately hacking off 20% of your Arcane Missiles ticks? I know I sure don't want Frost designed around beating latency to cheat the Fingers of Frost buff. I want spells and talents to do what their tooltips say they're supposed to do, and I want them to be combinable into interesting and fun combinations that are built and balanced intentionally and thoughtfully.

/castsequence [nochanneling:arcane missile] etc etc etc...

This seems better if you are somehow capable of hitting your macro key an arbitrarily large number of times per second, if I understand the bug correctly....

Well dragonrhonin, I draw the line not at the same place as you vontre and sancus. Personally I believe that the game should behave as indicated in spell tooltips. As such, I draw the line between shatter and fof/abarr, whereas you guys clump them all together because yes, functionally they are the same category of bug (although one uses travel time and the others use network latency, which is definitely not the same thing).

I mean, look at shatter. Shatter gives you no indication whatsoever that it behaves incorrectly. When you cast a spell, and that your target is frozen, you gain +50% crit. And thats exactly what it does too. Sure, when it lands its not frozen anymore, but the fact remains that it perfectly respected whats written on the shatter tooltip, for as long as you understand that spell damage/crit/etc. is determined at the time of cast.

Now you have a look at FOF/abarr. Its clearly abusing latency issues between server/client. The tooltip tells you clearly that you should get no more than 2 crits from FOF, but you can get 3. Likewise, if you read the arcane blast tooltip its pretty obvious its not intended to affect more than one spell.

For what its worth, I do strongly believe that the AB glyph wasn't meant to boost arcane dps by 5-7% (400 dps). Glyphs are meant to be worth 1-2 talent points. Already, right there, something seems wrong to me. I wouldn't be surprised if whoever coded it didn't think through that it would end up stacking 3 times. I also believe that they could fix the abarr bug by making the AB debuff only boost abarr damage. Actually just that would kill 2 birds with 1 stone -- effectively fix the abarr bug and make the ab glyph more in-line with what a glyph is supposed to be.

As has been posted before, if you do that you will never get an arcane shatter combo, as the arcane barrage stack falls off when the Arcane Missile channel ends. You have to cast Arcane Barrage before Arcane Missiles finishes casting (either before or just after the 5th missile fires), to get the increased damage buff.

While I agree that the glyph seems a little generous, keep in mind that the game has plenty of exceptions to the various 'rules' of design. Talents giving an ~1% increase is one such vague design umbrella, yet GC has commented that they are OK with certain exception talents (Survival of the Fittest comes to mind) - it doesn't seem too unrealistic to accept that some glyphs just follow a similar pattern. If people truly wanted Glyphs to follow the glyph=couple talent points design, they would really be acknowledging that some glyphs will simply be considerably better/worse than the pack.