Here is the old description (applicable to Mike's patch, and some of which may be applicable to my patch):
This removes the axes.py code from Sage and switches to Matplotlib's code. This allows for things like log scales as well as more flexibility in controlling how the ticks are labeled formatted. It also fixes a number of existing bugs (like 2754). After this change, it will be trivial to add a viewer='flot' option to Graphics.
The patch still needs some work a.k.a. doctests. There are also a few things that don't work yet (like tick color and tick fontsize), and matrix_plot needs a matplotlib Locater and Formatter. Also, GraphicsArray? needs to be updated and should get lots of doctests for it added.