Way of seeing data as image anywhere in a Cycles nodes setup? I made a complicated nodes setup for a material using Cycles.  Is there an easy simple way to peek at the data passing through any node, to view it as an image?  I desire something like an oscilloscope, where I can touch a probe to any point of the circuit and see what kind of signal is there.

In Blender Internal, I could make many Output nodes and hook them up anywhere, and they'd show the data as a texture on a sphere, cube, Suzanne or whatever.  There doesn't seem to be anything like this for Cycles nodes.

Example of using Output to monitor textures along the "circutry".  (This is not any sensible texture; just messing around with BI nodes.)
Personally, I use a temporary Emission shader and connect it to whatever I want to look at. I also have a small viewport render open almost permanently.
The emission shader renders really quickly taking only a couple samples to converge, so it's nearly instantaneous, especially if you go into local view (Numpad /).

I've recently released an add-on that uses this method, but sets it all up for you so you simply have to Ctrl+Shift+Left Click a node to view it's result (just like the compositor).



[Update: The Node Wrangler add-on mentioned is included in Blender now, simply enable it in your user preferences]