I also heard that they aren't really recommending the 6800IA solution as much. We were steered towards the 3650/3850 switches for new deployments. If it matters to you, the 6800IA switches do not support campus fabric.
I'll tell you from experience with the 6800IA switches that they can certainly be a pain. The idea that they don't need to be managed is false. Cisco hasn't provided a method to monitor the FEX's remotely. What if a 6800IA stack goes down? Prime Infrastructure doesn't alarm, Nagios can't query these switches as they haven't implemented all of the MIBs that stand alone switches have. Software upgrades can be difficult. We've had to go out and power cycle the 6800IA stacks that get stuck booting after a software upgrade. Software upgrades can also leave your 6800IA stacks offline for hours as the code is downloaded and stacks are rebooted (If you are near the port count limit). Sure, this is all automatic, but it sucks. You can't easily pre-download software like you can on other switches. If you jump through a bunch of hoops you can extract the 6800Ia image from the 6880 bin, and manually load it onto the 6800Ia clients with the "test fex image download fex-id 148 location tftp://192.168.1.1/xxxx" command, but that takes almost an hour for a single stack of 2 or more switches.
