Dropbox does an AJAX request when you enter your username, and it's fast enough that when you get to the password field it's already greyed out if you use SSO.
This should be the answer. As soon as the user enters a valid email (regex test) send a request to server to figure out what path they need to go down in the “federated flow”. What we shouldn’t do is diminish the experience for some because the flow for some others is different.