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I swear Nikon is applying some evil un-switchable NR before the files get saved as RAW, whether it's strong hardware NR or whatever. Can anyone confirm this? or at least share the same suspicion?

At ISO 3200 the detail loss is simply too obvious. Forgive my ignorance if this is something widely known to the nikon community. I came from a D50, which in my opinion still beats D300 at high ISO performance at ISO 1600. With D50, there is very little detail loss across the ISO range. I'm talking about RAW of course.

RAW is not really 100% RAW data from the sensor.. camera's processor has already processed it before it is saved as a raw file
part of the processing is noise reduction.

here is an article looking at Sony A900's RAW image NR:
http://www.cryptobola.com/PhotoBola/Sony...900_NR.htm

That's why i think 5D MK2's high ISO performance improvement over 1Ds Mk3 is mainly coming from a better noise reduction algorithm which is applied to even the RAW files.

And that's why the high ISO performance is improving (to a lesser extent) from D300 -> D90 -> D5000 even they share the same sensor.