I prefertextsl{} to\emph{} or\textit{} as I, among others, find the font (as output by PDFLaTeX) more readable. It would be nice for convenience so I don't have to manually add words back in.

Currently text in\textsl{} tags is not carried over to .doc, .docx or .odt formats. Ideally, it would become italicised text. As far as I know, only LaTeX differentiates between slanted text and italics between all the formats Pandoc supports.