Interesting, thanks for pointing out the updated version of what "straightforward" means. Last time I looked at Markdown you couldn't do a lot of things I needed in it, such as figures, footnotes, and references, so I didn't give it very serious consideration. But it looks like pandoc has extended the original Markdown into some kind of Markdown++, which covers just about everything I usually need.

In pandoc you can also use raw mode, which will just pass through all tex commands you use in your markdown file.

    pandoc text.md --parse-raw -t latex -o text.tex

Then you can proceed to compile this to a pdf with pdflatex.