If you're curious though here's how I deal with your limitations & barriers. Not sure if it will work for you or not or if you want to change the way you do things.
I want one that I can throw ripped movies onto
Rip to H264. Even the piracy groups have switched to it. If you encode your ripped movies to H264 they will play on almost any device. Xbox, Playstation, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, etc. Even OS/2 Warp has support via VLC. (though good luck getting OS/2 installed on a machine with the guts to play H264 video) With all my files in H264 I don't have to worry about this at all.
I want a tablet whose memory I can expand with SD cards.
With cloud storage/services I feel like my iPad has unlimited storage. The one area I think this is an issue is transferring photos or videos from another camera into the iPad which is what the Camera Connection Kit handles for now. I suspect in the near future it will all be handled wirelessly. Looking back into history as soon as the local area network appeared people didn't really bother walking floppy disks around anymore. The same is going to happen with SD cards. I haven't owned an SD card in probably 6 or 7 years. I'm not really sure what I would do with one at this point.
I want one that lets me use it as a simple removable drive
There are a number of applications that just create a writable network share on the iPad. Seems easier to me than finding a cable and plugging it in. This also goes back to cloud storage/services that just sync the data for you automatically. I rarely find that I actually need to use these apps. I just put the file onto Dropbox and let it sync. Done.
bloated iTunes client.
I don't sync my iPhone or iPad to a computer anymore. Works fine without it.
I want one that I can throw ripped movies onto
Rip to H264. Even the piracy groups have switched to it. If you encode your ripped movies to H264 they will play on almost any device. Xbox, Playstation, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, etc. Even OS/2 Warp has support via VLC. (though good luck getting OS/2 installed on a machine with the guts to play H264 video) With all my files in H264 I don't have to worry about this at all.
I want a tablet whose memory I can expand with SD cards.
With cloud storage/services I feel like my iPad has unlimited storage. The one area I think this is an issue is transferring photos or videos from another camera into the iPad which is what the Camera Connection Kit handles for now. I suspect in the near future it will all be handled wirelessly. Looking back into history as soon as the local area network appeared people didn't really bother walking floppy disks around anymore. The same is going to happen with SD cards. I haven't owned an SD card in probably 6 or 7 years. I'm not really sure what I would do with one at this point.
I want one that lets me use it as a simple removable drive
There are a number of applications that just create a writable network share on the iPad. Seems easier to me than finding a cable and plugging it in. This also goes back to cloud storage/services that just sync the data for you automatically. I rarely find that I actually need to use these apps. I just put the file onto Dropbox and let it sync. Done.
bloated iTunes client.
I don't sync my iPhone or iPad to a computer anymore. Works fine without it.