Diablo 3 Follower max level

Item perks like movement speed or life steal are individual and not shared with your party or follower. Class skills, on the other hand, can imbue party members and your follower.

You get 20% of your follower's added Magic Find, Gold Find, and XP bonuses.¹ You followers don't have drops and only add to your stats.

You get none of your follower's resource bonuses, and Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence perks increase damage for the Templar, Scoundrel, and Enchantress, respectively.² +Vitality gear adds 10 follower HP for each point.

The concept of bind-on-equip doesn't exist in Diablo III. Bashiok said something about it here (scroll down to his post):

Yeah, we realized that binding is kind of a crappy way to pull items out of the economy. If you say that the average player produces 100 items an hour and maybe gets 1 upgrade in that time, then binding at best can account for removing 1% of items from the economy. And that's being very generous at high levels.

Binding isn't really substantial in making a viable economy, but it is really good at establishing item prestige. Which is how it's used in WoW.

We expect salvaging to be compelling enough to remove a good percentage of the most valuable items from the economy. High end components obtained from salvaging high end items are needed for high end crafting and enhancement.

We're not promising anything on patch content, but we also feel that keeping up on introducing new items consistently will keep it from being possible for a glut of the best items from building as 'the best' can be a constantly moving target.

Courtesy of Krazer (in the comments):

Jay Wilson: I’m happy to announce that we recently decided there will be no binding of items in Diablo III. They will be freely traded for the life of the item. The only way we are going to do any kind of binding would be for things that are not progression-sensitive. Like we might say…a quest item. We don’t want you to be able to give to other player to short circuit a quest, but if you find a sword, piece of armor, or gem….anything that you find in the ground, once you pick it up, you can freely trade it…forever.