I am not yet sold on astropy tables instead of pandas. If we provide a way to convert between the two and everyone ends up moving the data into a pandas data frame then there is very little point in removing the dependency. Pandas is close to being a standard for scientific python computing (see it on the scipy.org site) so it may become as ubiquitous as numpy and scipy. I personally like I use it way more than scipy and we currently depend on scipy as well.