obviously the USB2 ones are going to come up short on bandwidth, especially as USB isn't full duplex.
Largely irrelevant. Full-duplex at GigE speeds matters only for servers for the most part, and those aren't the machines that will be using USB NICs.
Nearly everyone with an Apple notebook is going to be limited by their internet connection (5-30mbit/sec for most), not by the ~250mbits/sec Real-Life performance of a USB2 NIC.
Not irrelevant - the only time I'd consider using wired would be to talk to my NAS box, and the thunderbolt gigE would give a useful bump over USB - after all, if I'm going to all the hassle of plugging in, I'm obviously in a hurry.
If I'm just doing external network stuff then WiFi will do me fine. It's showing as 135Mbit where I'm sitting right now, but gets up to 300 nearer the router (though you can obviously halve those numbers for actual throughput, it's still significantly above what Comcast will supply me).
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