Right. Most advances Canon has made in SLRs (say, the AF upgrades the comment you are replying to above mentions) could be easily 'backported' to a film camera: in a real SLR, the sensor isn't exposed to light until the picture is ready to be taken and focus/exposure settings have already been decided, so it's not like those features rely on the digital image sensor in any way.

The reason why Canon doesn't make a film SLR that includes the features that bring their cameras ahead of Nikon is because they don't think enough people will want to pay for them. And that's probably right.