Hi,
I think the main worry you have with using Variables everywere is the overhead it could imply compared to use pure Tensors directly? This has been looked into in details and in the current master branch, the overhead of using a Variable (with requires_grad=True or torch.no_grad()) is negligible. So you should not worry too much about the fact that you use Variables (or the merged version soon  ).
I guess you want to look at the new Tensor as not only an n-d array, but an n-d array that can optionnaly keep track of operations (so that you can use it with an autograd engine).
Did I miss another worry you had?