Hunter58 has the following paragraph in an entry above:
"All commercial FBW aircraft are first and foremost very nice flying maschines. They have to fulfill the same flight dynamic capabilities than any conventional aircraft. The FBW part concerns only the way the pilot input gets to the control surfaces. This as such is NOT automation."
I agree completely with the first, second, and fourth sentences above. My issue is with the third sentence. FBW concerns both the way that the pilot input gets to the control surfaces and how feedback of sensed airplane response also factors into the surface commands to achieve the desired response characteristics. Connecting the elevator directly to the pilots controller without any feedback augmentation will not necessarily (and need not) result in acceptable response characteristics. Careful design of the combination of pilot to surface and feedback control paths results in an integrated system that defines the augmented handling qualities that the pilot experiences.