[headgasket]

same here. I was going to order one last week to get the 1TB ssd via pcie 4 lanes (I have the 16/512 and that's hurting me at times, both ram and ssd), and to generally refresh battery and other things that get older; I was also worried apple may be going ipad on us (like they did on the 12 inch model), and get rid of the few ports left, all of which I'm using. (tb1 for Gb ethernet -- latency is an order of magnitude lower than wifi) tb2 for an imac27 in TargetDisplayMode, usb for a hub for target dev devices, the hdmi for a second 24inch monitor and the other usb for a backup drive.

I'm sure that if I could somehow do all of this over usb3 it would be tremendously slower, and there would be serious video issues. I used to use a usb2 video card (diamond bvu195), before apple added thunderbolt and hdmi, that was a major upgrade in productivity, so I'm happy to see they have not dropped ports and have simply added the new touchpad; I might very well refresh even though raw performance and capabilities are pretty similar, as a --vote with dollars-- gesture, depending on what dollars are available.

cheers,