Yeah, the only problem with removing the top text area is I often need to look at the text I'm "stringilizing". For instance, when I paste in tabular data from different sources, sometimes the columns are separated by tabs, sometimes other whitespace, and sometimes bizarrely. It helps to see the data after it's been converted to plain text to get the pattern replacement right.

I am going to try and implement the Clipboard module, though. It would be easy to add another button to process the clipboard directly, as you suggest, saving the copy-paste steps. I could see how this would be very convenient.