Bill have you actually worked with a tapeless work flow yet with a real job?
A) You can edit straight from a hard drive! No transfer needed for a quick job.
& B) Transfer rate is nowhere near "real time". My 60GB Firestore is about 5x faster than real time. Plus it holds over 4 hours of footage! Thats 5 tapes I don't have to babysit and switch out when they're done loading. I can transfer 4+hours of footage in the time it would normally take to load one tape.

And archiving is easily achieved by recording to tape and hard disk at the same time(at least on Cameras with a tape drives) I know the EX has none, but you know how many times I've needed to go back to tape backups during the year I've used a firestore? Zero. Which is why the completely tapeless EX work flow is not a concern for me. One can always transfer to a backup drive in the background while editing.