I think you are imagining features you'll never need in practice, and passing on a great tablet with amazing software, in favor of something you'll find far less satisfying than your laptop, and probably never use.
That's my hunch as well. Of course, there are certainly situations in which those extra features might be necessary, but they are in .01% of the case situations that the average iPad user is going to need it for.
I'm open for suggestions as I would like to get the new iPad. The things holding me back are: the inability to expand the memory, the challenge of playing common video formats like AVI or WMV and being pushed into the iTunes ecosystem (I use an Android phone so theoretically I'll be repurchasing apps, movies, music, etc)
If you mean memory as in storage, there are several ways around that for certain classes of data (mostly photos) through the camera connection kit. (I have a HDD photo tank that includes firmware capable of mounting a folder as if it were a camera card, fooling the iPad into mounting data from a hard drive.) On the other hand, with my 32GB iPad (2010), I don't think that I've hit a limit that I care about. (I don't typically care about movies on the iPad, and HandBrake works beautifully to convert DVDs for play on the iPad when I do care.)
For format issues, both AirVideo (http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/index.html) and ZumoCast (http://www.zumocast.com/) provide ways to stream data from your primary computer with 'live' transcoding of the data into formats that iOS devices can play without any additional codecs.
My suggestion is buy the new iPad. Play with it. You'll either realize that your concerns don't exist once you have the device, or they matter more than anything else. If the latter, wipe it and sell it. You'll get great resale value for it, even a year later. If the new iPad is as hard to get as the iPad 2 was when it first came out, you might even manage to break even.
You can use your music if it's in MP3 or AAC (which are pretty much the standard these days), you can play AVI and WMV. You will always have to repurchase your apps no matter which platform you jump to.
It sounds like such an old wife tale that people kept saying they can't play video formats. There are a number of ways of doing this. I have numerous friends who thinks this is the case, but it really is just a myth. There are even so many apps that pretends to be like a USB drive.
