There are times when it makes sense to skip a generation. I skipped the iPad 2 which was announced a few months after the iPhone 4 came out with a Retina display. My first reaction to the iPad was, "No Retina? Must be a supply chain constraint. I'll wait for the iPad 3." Since the iPad is basically a big screen, Retina was the only sensible upgrade worth waiting for.
As for the Watch, there's no way Apple's going to eke out more than two or three extra hours of battery life given it's feature profile. They might by able to shave off some thickness by a couple of millimeters. Realistically, I don't see anything specific that the next gen will offer that makes it worth waiting for.
I think the holdouts aren't really waiting for the next version, they're waiting to see if a critical mass of users develops, and how the Watch gets used in the wild. In the same way that the iPhone developed a lot of use cases that weren't obvious at launch (Instagram, Uber), I expect a similar trajectory of lateral development from the Watch.