ISTM that the other improvements like extents, hashed directory lookups, delayed allocation and whatever already might offset the journal overhead by a good bit.
Also - I haven't tried this though - shouldn't you be able to create an ext4 without a journal while keeping the other ext4 benefits? According to man tune2fs you can even remove the journal with -O^has_journal from an existing FS. The same is probably true for mkfs.ext4.