Good questions.
As to lenses, while RAW certainly does level the playing field, the camera is still at the mercy of the glass on it's nose, so to speak. If a lens renders certain colors a certain way, RAW picks that up and does not apply any after-effects or processing to it.
If you applied color-corrective profiles in post-processing dependent upon the lens used, you could theoretically get all the glass to perform "virtually" the same, but it would take a lot of trial and error to get the color sensitivity just right for each lens. And, perhaps more importantly, why would you want to do this? The whole point in having different pieces of glass isn't merely to cover multiple focal ranges, it's using certain lenses to get a certain "look" in the photograph. So in other words, despite camera profiles being created for each particular camera, you're still going to get different results with different lenses. The rendering on my Tak 55 is nothing like what I get out of my kit lens, and all my other settings are the same.
The beauty of RAW is that, yes, all that information comes out of the camera unmolested, and hence can be tinkered with to the enth degree in post-processing. The reason JPEG still exists on all these cameras is so that you don't have to molest each picture manually after the fact. You pick you settings for NR and the like, and you get what you get. All depends on how you like to shoot, and how much time you want to spend after you shoot.