The tradeoff, then, is that if someone's current problem maps exactly to the current API, then your API is more complex than needed.
I'm not arguing this is a terrible thing. In fact, I think this is an acceptable level of additional complexity for the power it buys you. But if we're going to make an honest evaluation of the trade-offs, I think we must mention this.
It may be relevant to the discussion to point out that I work on a tuple-based streaming system. Product: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/streams/ Academic: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1890754.1890761, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1645953.1646061