Intel mac and Preference Panel issues

Completely. Rosetta won't work for preference panes or device drivers, and things like browser plugins have to be for the same architecture as the parent program.

 

Yep, that's the ugly part not many people like to discuss. Peripherals not supported out of the box by OS X, and not still for sale from the manufacturer, are quite possibly now boat anchors.

For a printer, if you're lucky, you might find a CUPS driver that's reasonably compatible.

 

You said it...those programs are not currently Rosetta compatible and/or not universal binaries. This will be an issue for probably the 6 months to a year you own your Intel Mac...

Please be patient with this as developers get their software ported to both PPC and Intel, or working with Rosetta technology... There are a few apps out there that aren't Rosetta compatible. In time, everything will be back to the way it was on the PPC side...just plug it in and start using it.

 

I'm starting to feel a little bit better about skipping out on that new iMac purchase. At the time, I hadn't considered compatibility issues such as these, but it seems to be an increasingly daunting task as developers aren't reacting as quickly as some end-users might want them to react regarding the new architecture.
Hopefully Moore's law will kick in soon and this will no longer be an issue.