Twitter’s new forthcoming Retweet feature appears to do two important things well: it protects the integrity of the original tweet and it enhances the experience of Twitter as a social medium. It achieves these two objectives by reproducing the original tweet, complete with the original tweeter’s avatar, in your followers’ streams.
As described by Twitter’s Evan Williams, the official Retweet feature must make a trade-off for simplicity’s sake by not letting you alter or annotate the retweet (at least in the initial version). Manual retweets will still work in those cases where you want to comment on or reframe another person’s message.
Twitter is making the right choice in opting for simplicity.
