I remodeled a house and have a lot of ideas, I should probably post some pictures here.

Regarding the TV and the kitchen, my house is not "open concept" but more of "old house concept" and so the TV cannot be seen from the kitchen. I installed a 19" flat screen under the cabinets. It actually is a computer monitor but you can find monitors that make good enough TVs, or TVs that make good enough monitors. The base cabinet holds the computer itself, and this is the computer that runs all of my house stuff. I ran all the necessary wires through the walls (HDMI, PC monitor, Audio, Coax, USB had to have a custom wall plate built) from the back of the cabinet and vented the cabinet into the closet behind the wall. The wireless keyboard and mouse sits in a drawer when not in use.

This has become indispensable. We can pretty much throw out our cookbooks, especially since just scanning in favorite recipes and just call them up out of the files. Music from Pandora or files gets beamed out, or if you want to watch the news, flip over to the cable input.

We did do the prep-sink in the island. It has a few really good uses, and really didn't take much useful space away. If you prep your food on the island then it is nice to just sweep straight into it, and it also is good to plug up, fill with ice and beer/chilled wine for parties.

Regarding pantries, I actually had a corner walk-in pantry in our last home and hated it. Way too deep. In my current house I did full height cabinets along a wall in the breakfast nook area. Shallow cabinets. 2 are 12" deep and the other is 16" deep. This is the best set up I have had. It is all visual space and nothing gets lost behind stuff. The efficiency compared to the corner pantry is much better.