I really dig Markdown. But this nasty voice inside my head is saying "5 years from now, you're gonna wish you just did this in troff." Or for better and worse, it will evolve into troff.
Actually, I'm more concerned with the Markdown syntax and not about how pandoc (nice tool btw) converts it. The issue I see is unchecked feature creep, especially with the variants of markdown we're starting to see.
Reluctantly, I agree that plain text documents are the way to go. I used to be a FrameMaker user.