The fix for GRADLE-1009 has landed in the master branch. That is, you can now configure the test task to show the tests’ standard streams (out & err) directly on the console.
Obviously, most of you don’t need that, because your tests fail with meaningful assertion messages and you are never interested in system out. Not to mention that most of you don’t use system out but a proper logging tools 
Regardless, the feature might come handy if the gradle process is killed before test reports have been generated (the reports have always included the standard streams output).
Enjoy, some docs/examples you can find here and here
After the M6 release, the docs will be available at our usual location of the dsl reference for the Test task: http://gradle.org/current/docs/dsl/org.gradle.api.tasks.testing.Test.html