Write me down as "confused by the mandatory cards" thing, too. If people haven't required cards to keep track of their wizard/cleric/druid spells over the past eight years, they sure aren't going to need cards for
4e - in fact, less so because high-level PCs carry fewer available resources at any one time than in previous editions. The minis complaint, I can see, because people kind of wrote those out of existance with their own house rules in editions prior to
3e, and you have to "guesstimate" or modify a whole lot of powers in
4e that deal with squares of movement.