In a recent message to the webkit-dev mailing list, Dean Jackson outlined some details about plans to enable CSS Transitions (and related WebKit-specific CSS visual effects) on SVG properties in WebKit.

Excerpt:

We have plans to allow transitions on SVG properties:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21586

I predict that bug will probably get Animations working at the same time (in the engine there isn’t a huge difference).

Of course that will only work for SVG’s style properties, not the attributes (like cx/cy for the positioning of a circle).

Transforms and 3D Transforms were written to be as compatible with SVG as possible. 2D transforms could reasonably apply to SVG (except the SVG specification says transform is an attribute, not a property). 3D transforms are slightly trickier because they could change the SVG rendering model for drawing order. The SVG WG at W3C are currently looking into this - we hope they come up with something that is compatible with what we have proposed.

For more context and a few more details, see the full text of the message.

To follow progress on this work, you can subscribe to WebKit bug 21586.