I have a heterodox opinion: it's not that important for cats to be at the hit cap. This came out in a discussion with Willowbear on my cat gear post and I wanted to examine it more.
First off, the basic math. +Hit lowers the chance that you Miss. The hit cap for feral druids is 142. That gives you an extra 9% chance to hit a mob, negating the 9% miss rate against level 73 bosses. Anything above 142 is wasted.
The usual advice for new melee DPS is %26quot;get more +hit%26quot;. This is good advice, because generally when you start out in T4 raiding you have no hit at all on your gear. However, sometimes you have to make tradeoffs between hit and other stats. Hit helps you do damage, but agility/ap/crit makes your hits bigger. You want a balance of the two.
The details of that +hit balance vary depending on your stats. For my cat gear I rely on Toskk to weight it. His model tell me that in my current cat gear +1 agility is worth +1.5 hit. Ie: point for point agility is better for me, even though I'm not at the hit cap. I'll take +2 hit over +1 agility, but I'll take +1 agility over +1 hit. (Which has significant implications for gems). Note that at T6 gear levels the balance is heavily in favour of agility; at lower gear levels, +hit is more valuable.
One thing to watch out for with the +142 hit cap is once you've reached it, you don't benefit from any other hit. Any new gear with more +hit is wasted. Being in a group with a Draenei for another 1% hit doesn't help you. Improved Faerie Fire's +3% hit doesn't help you. Neither does +20 hit from food. If you run at the hit cap, you may be missing out on useful buffs. So there's an argument that it's best to be a bit under the hit cap for cat DPS.
The hit cap math works out differently for bears. Bears don't care much about average DPS, although it sure helps with threat generation. But we very much want predictable DPS. In particular that very first Mangle is critical. If you miss, then you have no threat on the mob and your trigger happy warlock will pull aggro with her first Shadowbolt. Worse, melee +hit also governs the chance that your Growl taunt works; no +hit means your taunt is going to fail 5% of the time on trash. So it's not just that +hit gives you incrementally more DPS and threat, it's that it makes you a more predictable tank.
While +hit is nice for bears, it's hard to find tanking gear with it. I'm a big fan of the Brooch of Deftness for tanking (or the new Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve), but it has no defence which can create problems. The T5 pants are unusual in having some +hit. But other than that, it's quite a trick to find +hit in tank gear.
By the way, +hit only helps with Miss. You can also be Dodged or Parried; +Expertise helps with that. Ideally cats are never parried because they stand behind the mob, but even avoiding the dodge portion significantly helps DPS. And expertise is even more useful than hit for bear tanking. Not only do you land blows more often, you avoid parries and the subsequent riposte for a quick second attack. Ie: expertise is a mitigation stat for bears, too. There's a lot of debate about what the Expertise cap is, but it's fair to say for feral druids there's no practical upper bound.
Right now in my threat tanking gear I have 129 hit rating, 21 expertise rating. (That's probably too much hit). In my survival gear I have 42 hit rating, 0 expertise rating.