Hi,
My point was, there may be alternative, non-PV implementations to suck such information out of a guest, IPMI being one example of a management interface that exists for physical servers. So it's not necessarily black-or-white, but choices similar to virtio vs. IDE vs. AHCI vs. SCSI.
pvpanic not meant to replace IPMI though.
You probably don't want use both though, and if you want to pick one of the two you need a way to turn off pvpanic.
cheers, Gerd