One of the surprises I had was the the original Nexus7 did not have a microphone-in as the 4-th? ring on the Headphone Jack so that there was no convenient way to use an external microphone to get louder/more directional... sound into the Nexus7, did you check to see if this had been "fixed" in the Nexus7.1?

Also, by the lack of any comments, I assume that there were no other ports in the 7.1 system, but that I have heard that there is some way to drive a HDMI display via hardware connection?