I've never liked item level to begin with. It is a stupid and lazy way to design gear. It leaves no room for creativity on either the developers or the players part by forcing everything to be equal. I'm sick and tired of everything needing to be equal. Of course it would require a change in the stat system to allow for diversity in both gear stats and player choice. No more one main stat and four secondary stats. Hell, I'd rather have more stat options to give the illusion of choice even if there was no real difference.

Slightly more on topic, if they are keeping item levels I'd rather scale all pre-51 gear to ilvl 50 and not increase ilvl so quickly at cap. Why jump up 10 levels every patch? Ilvl 61 in 3.1, 62 in 3.2, etc... That would have no effect on actual gear performance as the stats could still scale at the same rate if they wanted. I'd personally rather have horizontal progression, but that isn't a very popular model in today's MMOs.