Coming from the same point of view as you. From my perspective I don't think the difference is truly noticeable (depending on what you're using it for). It looks like PDO is simply a database api that merges ALL of the other database api's into one. So if you needed to connect to a MS Sql server and MySQL server, you could simply call on the PDO api and specify the driver for the specific db. My guess is also that any future features and abilities in MySQL will be only available in PDO. So basically just use PDO to ensure that you have access to all the latest features.
