How does physical damage compare to ele (bow)?

I have an ele ranger that I recently leveled and it's doing quite well. I probably won't be able to level a phys dmg/crit bow build to see how it compares...so, has anyone done that comparison? In particular, how they both scale with high end gear (for example, max phys dmg + ias + ele dmg bows).

The damage output of elemental is easily 10x that of physical, and you can use critical damage/chance and attack speed on both, with less investment for elemental damage. Generally elemental is the better choice. The reason behind this is several factors.
-Elemental damage on non-weapon equipment can be rolled 4 times (Cold, Fire, Electric, Weapon Elemental Damage), where as physical can only be rolled once.
-Elemental Weapon Damage has fewer modifiers, but they are so much larger than Physical Weapon Damage modifiers that to just get the same amount of Physical Weapon Damage as the Weapon Elemental Damage support gem, one would need to spend at LEAST 14 passive skill points (assuming you got all 4 of the notable nodes including Perfect Aim, Greater Impact, Master Fletcher, and Heavy Draw)
-Elemental damage can scale off of your physical damage, but your physical damage can NOT scale off of your elemental damage.
-Three elemental damage aura's, but no physical damage equivalent.
-One can lifleech and manaleech off of elemental damage with the support skill gems, and since the damage is 10x higher, you still get 5x more leech than someone using physical damage if they were to get twice the amount of leech as you have.
-Elemental Hit. The base damage on this skill is in a league of it's own.

The simple fact of the matter is that Elemental Damage is so much better than Physical Damage that to choose to be a "physical damage ranger" is like cutting off one of your legs before a race.

Lezli's post has hit it on it's head. However, one thing to point out are the ele-resist mobs and ele-reflect bosses/mobs. These are things you deal with constantly and ele-reflect in the last difficulty constantly. So be careful to not overcommit on crit damage and 1shot yourself like many veterans have. (though that's more of an abuse of diamond flasks than anything)

I really hope they make physical damage bow users more viable than elemental damage bow users since ele bow easily outweighs physical dmg.