Trying the Cycles fur settings means going through a lot of different parameters. Some are obvious, some are not, some give me serious trouble, and even if you manage to find something that looks good enough - it may not render flicker-free in animation, or render so slowly that you can't really process animation at all. Gimme samples baby, gimme more samples!

Here are a few different steps throughout the furring process. Not all of these heads are actually finished fur coats, some are intermediary steps like "the transmission part of a hair shader".

Ironically, I ended up with using none of the hair nodes, which run into issues when combined - but only a simple Diffuse shader. I miss the glossy highlights but you have to take what you get until you can shake a developer for the details...