I'm sure these will be the next thing to go. "Skill levels" i.e. numbers indicating the level of your current skills, such as 93 in Destruction, 52 in Alchemy, etc. I see them being fazed out by a new, number-less system in the next TES game. Could be they just move to a more intuitive system of "novice-apprentice-adept-expert-master" for the skills. I'm not sure why they didn't do that for Skyrim really. It would have fit more with the overall theme.

Like M'aiq says: " I don't care how strong you are, or how smart you are, it's about what you can DO". I like that explanation for the removal of attributes. Removing skill levels won't be as drastic as removing attributes though.

Thoughts?