In browsers that I am aware of, there is a status bar (safari requires that you enable it) which contains various information during page loading and when you hover your mouse over it. While different browsers may have slightly different syntax in the way they present the information, there is some useful things there.

When a page is loading items, There may be a "Loading... XX of XXX items". If the page is doing something in the background (AJAX work or backend access) or initial loading, it usually has a "Waiting for server.com" or some equivalent. When the page has finished, it persists with a "Done" until you hover over something (like a link) that changes the text.

Since this can provide more granular information than some of the page checking tools alone, it would be nice to have access to the text on the bar via selenium's API. Other people might find a waitFor method for the status worthwhile as well.

Something similar to:

void waitForStatusBar(String text);
String getStatusBar();