To sum up my thoughts
Shaman don't have the defensive o-shit button that paladins have... but thats OK because it is on a 5 minuet cooldown. Will it save you in some situations? Of course. Will you have it up all the time? Maybe 5 times a battleground depending on the BG. Paladin's AOE heals like a wet noodle in comparison to the high coefficient scaling of a resto shaman's chain heal.
The shaman has so much more to offer than the paladin does to the group as a whole, it can also be played offensively with preemptive healing with things such as healing rain. Your group takes much less damage overall as a shaman because of the mechanics for AOE healing, crits, extra healing from crits, extra healing from using offensive spells, constant AOE heals from totems unless killed.
Shaman can help kill the target and keep the group alive at the same time, where as a paladin will require full time heal duty and need to use EVERY global cooldown to it's best ability, and requires sometimes up to 18 seconds to get the correct holy power for their AOE ability. Sure people will be beating on you but the amount of holy power one will get from that may only be enough to AOE heal in a situation once where as a shaman could have done so twice and for much more.
If you really think bubble (lasting 8 seconds on a 5 min cooldown) combined with the throughput of healing every two minuets opposed to increased healing at all times and more so if your team is lower in health like some situations will call for and requiring usage of precious healing GCD to make sure your paladin is taking the least amount of damage possible then thats fine. The SINGLE saving grace for a paladin is the ability to beacon them self and get healing as he heals the team, but the shaman can get that in a similar fashion as well... keep in mind at 85 we can't go spamming flash heals either, and on a paladin when you OOM you die, on a shaman when you OOM you drop your mana spring totem and keep on trucking.
Edit: one last thing... you need to beacon your paladin which means you need to heal YOURSELF to get extra holy power which is a waste of a GCD, unless you plan on wasting a heal GCD to put beacon on yourself when being attacked. Shaman also don't need to spec differently in order to make them more effective offensively like a paladin does.
As far as throughput when you are in trouble.... healing stream + healing rain + chain heal/other heals + earth shield + riptide.... theres A LOT there... especially if you lust.
To talk about priests
They are very good healers, but when focused in cata have the 1 trick pony fear and then are done for. Yes they get mass dispel but your damage output on a target with necrotic strike cannot be healed so if a healer bubbles(paladin) then it really doesn't matter. There might be some situations where massdispell comes into play where they lust or something but the only real use for this i see is to dispel an AOE fear and this wouldn't be a problem for the shaman either because of the tremmor totem... so ultimately it is the same utlity with a pulse time opposed to a cast time... and you still need to trinket your fear to use it in that manner.
Fear ward = single toon anti-fear every 3 mins... good but not spectacular.
Disc priests are great preemptive healers and pretty damn good at healing otherwise, but i just think that with you having no real AOE heal and you need to constantly be using GCD on shields while healing and micromanaging all of that... yes it is possible but is it really worth it to be less effective overall? (in my opinion)
Don't get me wrong... priests can be great and HIGHLY mobile, but they were intentionally nerfed it seems as all the priests i know in game complain about their healing all the time.
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