TheBigN resurfaced today with a summary for Kamichu. It's quite long and attempts to build some interesting comparisons, to which I don't have anything to add. But I'd like to pick on this:

And while off sometimes, you couldn’t really have major complaints about the animation, art, and music.

Actually, I totally can. Animation was bad in a number of sequences. I have a few screenshots from the Christmas episode where it looks like concept art inked with a bucket fill tool. He says "sometimes", but I think the low quality spots were in fact rather common. And even when high-line-count and properly inked, it still failed sometimes (real "sometimes" now though). For example, in the transfer episode, the welcome back sequence was outsourced to someone who blew the art. Not only the welcoming party didn't adhere to the standard, the art was simply ugly. The instances of excellent art and animation happened, but overall, Kamichu is an uneven work.