This is odd, for me there is no lag on Lion when I hold down the backspace key. And what do you mean by stream redirection? That usually means this:
> echo "derp" > foo.txt
That has nothing to do with iterm2 and everything to do with bash or whatever shell you are using, I think.
Might you be confusing iterm2 with iterm? Iterm2 is a completely separate piece of software than iterm, it's not the second version of the same one.