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I'm cuious about a few things though. if you FLAC a wav and then reconvert it back to a wav will you get the identical file (bitwise) or will it just be "acoustically" identical?

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FLAC only stores the 'fmt' and linear uncompressed PCM 'data' subchunks. If you have other subchunks in there it will skip them with a warning. If the input is "canonical WAVE", i.e. one fmt chunk followed by one data chunk and nothing else, WAV->FLAC->WAV will be identical. All input WAVEs in the FLAC comparison page are in canonical form.

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If it really is the same file, how is FLAC so much more efficient than conventional compression algorthyms? is it just really well tuned to compress wav audio?

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FLAC first does inter-channel decorrelation for stereo input (removing spatial redundancy, roughly, removing components of the signal that are duplicated in both channels). This is specific to stereo audio. Then it does intra-channel decorrelation to remove the kind of temporal rendundancy that is found in sampled audio (this is with a linear digital filter (FIR)). After that the residual signal is Huffman-coded which is common to general purpose codecs.

Josh