These are the major points of this storm as I see it.

WX Factors:
The storm lost its structure starting late last night. The perfect symmetry seen all day gave out and the Southwest and West sides of the storm lost considerable strength. The East side of the storm appears to have held it's strength for the most part. The turn to the north about 15 miles east of where forecast in addition to the weakening of the west side of the storm spared probably a 50 mile or greater swath to the west of the eyewall the catastrophic damange they had expected (city of NO included)
Meanwhile the East side of the storm appears to have arrived as advertised with massive storm surge flooding probably from the MS/LA border to Mobile and beyond. The weakening was too little too late to do much to reduce the surge much on that side as far as I can tell.

Damage Factors:

1. The major fear, huge catastrophe in NO never materialized, in a very general view I think we can all be relieved. The talk yesterday was a direct hit from cat 5 in the city making in uninhabitable for months, 10's of thousands dead, toxic soup covering the city. Hundreds of thousands stranded with no food/water/dry land. Major failure of the superdome with 30k people inside and so on. This clearly did not happen on a widespread level. This is the good news. This is not to minimize the damage that did occur in NO, I'm sure it's been fatal and locally catastrophic. but not close to realizing the fears of "the big one".
http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf?/washingaway/thebigone_1.html

2. Like a few people have said, the "We're OK" from NO doesn't speak for other localities. The storm surge will likely have destroyed a huge amount of property and some loss of life. The giant wind field likely caused an unusually large area of minor to moderate damage. I think as the picture clears up the media focus will turn to the huge geographic area affected especially the area affected by surge. Hard to guess a $ value, but I'd guess top 5 of all time is practically a given.