Lol...That too.

If you want an attractive character cure your disease or stay level 1.

Skyrim vampires are known to be a lot different from the Cyrodiil variety. If we go by the lore:



Then I would expect that the immediate benefit would be that becoming a vampire would give you an immediate "Ice Breath" power, as well as a nice resistance to Frost magic and weakness to Fire magic to counterbalance.

Now, as we all know, Oblivion's vampirism system was not very good, given that it encouraged you NOT to feed, which goes against every vampire Mythos in the book, so we should probably hope that Skyrim fixes this by feeding making you stronger.

Of course, there is nothing that disproves the notion that the Cyrodiilic tribe might have a stake in Skyrim, though.

So far, it's not clear from Dave Oshry's article whether the vampires he encountered were Volkihar or not. All that we know is they were in a cave in a mountain north of Riverwood, perhaps near Morthal or just inside The Pale.

Considering the changes to all the character models for the various races, I would agree - we are likely to see quite a difference from Oblivion vampires. And I hope you are right about the feeding part

I agree... although I'm inclined to believe that we weren't seeing a representation of the Volikhar because of the following two things (speculation speculation):

• The Lore suggests they dwell under the lakes, not within the mountains?
  
• They threw fireballs at him

They were obviously weak to fire. But so are all the vampires (aren't they?). And they left the typical vampire dust.

To be honest with you I believe the difficulty in the demo was scaled down dramatically. I doubt bethesda would make weak vampires unless they had purpose.

I HOPE (!) that at least one of the projected DLC's is committed to the werewolf and vampire lores and clans in Skyrim. I think the OP's breakdown of the dfferent phases of vampirism is brilliant btw. Two of my favorite comtemporary vampire films is 'Thirst' and "Let The Right One In" and the visual transformation (in the OP's vampire tree as a Level 3 vampyre) of Marcus from Underworld Evolution is incredible:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VxZGC3sq04

What if I wanted to remain a level 2? I like to think that if you feed once it reverts you one stage, and the 'stages' keep going after level 3 to maybe level 50 or so, but only in the way that you need to feed 49 times to return you to level 2, and 50 to return you to level 1. Ergo maybe keeping you at the bestial form for longer, and havign a bigger consiquence when you don't feed. Maybe you need to feed twice to get back to one.

So level one - one week without feeding becomes level 2: requires 2-4(depending on weeks not fed) feeds to revert to level one, one month without feeding becomes level 3, and then every week you don't feed you need to feed that many times to revert to level 2, then 1?