It's little more then a hyped up, overly glorified gamma settings.
Though it's significantly easier to properly adjust then straight gamma settings, but without enough tweaking one can almost duplicate Digital Vibrance straight through the gamma controls.
I believe there are some minor differences between DV and gamma settings though, but I'm not sure off hand what those are.
May want to check back in Anand's old editorial on it from when it was first introduced with the GF2 MX.