Pixel peeping has its merits, when you want to make a detailed technical assessment of your gear and your own capabilities, but at the end of the day our aim is to be shooting pictures, not pixels, so isn't it more important that we are able to produce good pictures, without fretting over the individual elements from which they are constructed?
Apart from pixel peeping, I suspect the problem facing the 7D is unrealistic expectations about cropability. Crop a 7D image too much and you'll be left with an area of silicon no bigger than that from a point and shoot, and with IQ to match. At low ISO you can get away with it with little pain, but as the ISO goes up or the shooting situation is more demanding (fast action and/or poor light for example) then your expectations about cropping need to be realigned to match. Sadly, for people who don't think these things through, having more pixels squeezed into the same area of silicon is seen as a free licence to crop tighter. Well that's naive at best. If you're having to crop (much) it's not the camera's fault. Blame the lens for not being long enough. Blame yourself for not getting close enough. Don't blame the camera because you choose to throw away half the image, or more, which you recorded onto the sensor. It's already a crop sensor. Don't keep cropping and expecting miracles.
Another angle on all this is sharpening. If you shoot a sharp image - properly sharp - then you won't need to apply much more sharpening in post. That is a benefit if noise is a concern. However, if you have a crappy lens, crappy focus, crappy technique etc. and end up with a soft image you're going to want to sharpen it more aggressively. Do all that at high ISO and rocks and hard places spring to mind. You can get by quite well if you use the whole frame, but combine that lot with heavy cropping and it's not the camera you should be blaming.
