For a commuter computer, the things I really want are temperature, time of day, odometer, trip distance, current speed and average speed. Of course, even from that list temperature and time of day are the only ones really relevant to my commute. When I was first starting out, I used cadence a lot, but now I can judge that pretty well by feel. I've got a Cateye Adventure on one of my bikes, and it strikes me as a much better commuter/geek-out computer than the Cateye Commuter. I love the elevation grade feature, and the wireless works very well.
Bad wireless is worse than no computer at all, in my experience, because at least half the time you get interference distance. Good wireless is very nice but always expensive.