And it turned into a MIDI clip. And the MIDI clip played a line VERY close to the audio. If I'd known Sonar X3 could do that, I would have got it years ago. 

LOL! 

It's a new feature to Sonar X3; has been out a couple of weeks, am I missing the sarcasm here ?

Yeah you were I guess not really sarcasm though, I was just expressing my surprise and delight at a little trick I accidentaly found just messing around with my freshly installed new toy. I kinda refuse to figure out how to work the little smile face things.

I read about this new "audio to midi" feature in one of the Cakewalk blog entries, it's actually made possible by the new ARA integration in X3, something to do with Melodyne.

I tried it with an audio drum track and got zip!

 dunno how much I plan to use it, but it sure seems futuristic and cool. Nifty.

It will only work on a single voice, it's not multi-timbral. That's from the Melodyne website. You can get multiple voices with an upgrade. It sounds like a handy thing for a guy like me. I suppose I could whistle a melody and use it to trigger a cello sample. Cool.

It doesn't do drums as well as Ableton (nor set up an Instrument track for you) but the simple drag and drop is really cool :)

It's fantastic! Great workflow enhancer. I played some acoustic guitar chords, dropped the audio file onto a MIDI track, assigned a soft synth (Spanish acoustic guitar)...and a surprisingly natural "performance" is the result. Of course, I had to upgrade to Melodyne Editor for this to work (polyphonic). But I had great results with Assistant too; played a bass track, converted perfectly to MIDI etc.