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I may not have played a priest but I wore almost all priest gear on my druid. When I choose gear for a character I normally try to max out one stat that will make me extremely powerful. Healing gear is very different. There are three stats that are crucial for a good priest: Intellect, Spirit, and Healing Power. I personally like to balance these stats so they are all strong. Of course it's up to you what you prefer to focus on so I will go over what each stat does for you.

Intellect: This will boost your maximum mana and increase your critical heal chances. If you have a huge amount of mana, naturally you can use more heals before running out. I don't put much faith in critical heal chance, because it's a random thing that you really can't rely on. You just occasionally get a heal for a huge amount of bonus health. It's a nice bonus to increased intellect though.

Spirit: This dictates how much mana you regenerate over time. When you aren't casting heals, your mana naturally regenerates slowly. Increasing spirit increases the amount of mana you recover every tick (5 seconds or so). This won't regenerate nearly as much while casting so it's better for players like myself who like to rely on casting a whole bunch of healing over time heals then backing off for a few seconds to recover mana. My druid had enough spirit that I could keep low to medium levels of healing constantly going and actually end a battle with more mana than I started.

Healing Power: Some rarer items will give you +Healing. This makes every single heal you do heal for more hp. The power increased depends on the cast time of the heals. Overall you will notice a boost in your healing power when you get more of these +healing items. If you get enough +healing to your attacks, they will do enough healing that you can actually use a lower rank heal to do the same healing power. For example I had about +1300 healing power on my druid. This made his heal rank 8 about as powerful as a normal heal rank 13. Instead of using the rank 13 heal for a huge amount of mana, I used the rank 8 version for much less mana. This is especially nice when you can use a rank 1 or 2 spell which usually casts faster than the higher ranks.

As a low level priest, I would go for mostly intellect, and perhaps some spirit. As you grow you might want to put more into spirit and +healing towards the higher levels. I personally prefer armor that has intellect and spirit on it. If you search for green armor "of the owl", you will find armor with boosted int and spirit together. "Of intellect" will also boost your int a little more than "Of the owl" but not by much more. For example, a green tunic of intellect may have about +4 int, and its of the owl counterpart will have +3 int, +3 spirit. So shopping on AH, I just type in "of the owl" into the search field and pick up whatever I can that's close to my level.  

If you get good enough stats, your mana will last a lot longer and you will be able to keep your group alive much longer.  

Another statistic commonly found on healing gear is mp5. Although its usefulness has been diminished by the recent changes to spirit, it still is something to consider when selecting gear - every little bit adds up.

 For my priest, I specifically geared with spell haste rating as my primary stat. Due to how few pieces of spell haste include spirit, I focused more upon obtaining and maintaining mp5 as opposed to spirit. My play style was also different than the average healing priest - being a discipline priest who healed a raid vs. a holy priest that healed a main tank or off tank. I sacrificed large heals for shorter cast times and additional survivability.

I'm so glad to have a REAL priest in the priest forums. As much as my druid posed as a priest, he just couldn't quite keep up. As a druid most of my main healing dealt with healing over time moves to keep the whole raid alive. I did very little actual casting so I focused on making my heals as big as possible so I could drop a HOT and move on. MP5 is another stat I loved when I could get my hands on it. That extra mana boost every 5 seconds really does add up, especially when you get the full effect while casting.

What are some specific gear sets you recommend for priests? 

Slightly off topic but I found that druids required the least amount of gear to be effective. Their heals and presence in a raid are so unique in comparison to the other healers - often they can focus simply on spirit/+heal and be completely fine as a tree - you don't go through enough mana burning casts in a short period of time to seriously deplete your mana bar. Plus, all that spirit will help to keep your natural regen reasonable.

 If you are going to be playing a "standard" healing priest (at least 30 deep in holy, preferably 41 or more) then I suggest on balancing between spirit and +heal. As with all spell casters you do not want to ignore stamina and intellect depending on what you are doing. In Burning Crusade there is an increasing amount of environmental damage inflicted across the party. Given that many priests are tailors, and wisely piece together the primal mooncloth set, you are down stamina from the get go. (While they are super useful pieces and I used both whitemends and primal mooncloth for a considrably long time, primal mooncloth completely lacks stamina and I spent most of my time gathering other pieces that had reasonable levels of stamina on them!). As the gear increases in item level, you can focus more completely on just high levels of spirit and heal, as all pieces will have stamina.

If you are playing a "hybrid" healer (at least 30 deep in discipline, perhaps more) then I suggest focusing more upon balancing your stats. Spirit will still be of use to you, and +heal obviously is a desirable stat, but intellect becomes that much more useful with mental strength. Because of the inherently lower health returned from greater heal, I chose to stack the +spell haste gear so as we had more versatility in the raid heals available. Even then, I still carried a set of gear that was built specifically around a holy priests' version of stats: high in spirit and bonus healing.

 As a new 70, I mostly focused on obtaining the tailoring pieces and then the badge gear - Khaarma's Shroud is still something I use though the Stainless Cloak of the Pure Hearted from prince in Karazhan is also amazing. The 2.4 badge loot that is put out is on par with much of the T6 that's available, but it will take a lot of badges to get there. I suggest Karazhan runs where you can pick up other alternative pieces of equipment: Light's Justice can hold you over for quite some time (prince), the Blue Wizard wand (opera), the bracers off of maiden, a great ring from Prince, a staff off of netherspite if you're so inclined. This should earn you enough badges in time to pick up a chestpiece, pants, and boots from the T6 vendor in Quel'Danas that will last you a very long time.

I always enjoyed my uniqueness as a druid. Powerful heal over times really lend themselves well to a druid's heals. I found my druid to be always welcome in raids as a backup healer, even without the best of gear. Just having the ability to resurrect someone in combat is so useful in raids. I once had a boss that took down half the raid right in the beginning. The druids all rezed each other, then the main tank and we managed to down the boss.