That's a reasonable question that we'd entertained ourselves before we settled on the current solution, and the answer will be a bunch of "inside baseball", but here's the nitty-gritty details if you're curious.
For one thing, buyers could enter a Shipping address in 2CO that differs from the shipping country and postal code they'd entered in the cart for shipping calculation before checkout, and unlike PayPal (and the late Google Checkout), 2CO has no way to callback to our system to recalculate Shipping charges based on the actual address entered at their end.
We also discovered that if we don't pre-collect Shipping address details to send 2CO, they would ignore any shipping amounts our cart would calculate and pass to them; instead, they'd apply shipping calculation rules (if any) defined at their end. We didn't want our sellers having to deal with the complexities of differing shipping calculation settings at each end which would likely calculate conflicting amounts in many cases and thereby confuse or annoy buyers as well.
To get around all that, since we're collecting a Shipping address to pass 2CO, we decided to also collect the Billing Address at our end, so buyers could do the simple "Shipping same as Billing" checkbox, and this also lets us "lock in" whatever shipping country and postal code they'd entered in the cart for shipping calculation before checkout.
When we transfer the buyer to 2CO, we also tell 2CO's checkout page to skip the address sections at their end and go straight to the Payment Information panel. While it's possible for buyers to re-expand the address panels at 2CO and change the address there, we do a comparison once 2CO completes the payment and sends the order details back to us.
If the country/postal got changed at checkout and doesn't match what was used to calculate tax/shipping in the cart beforehand, we include a "Possible Shipping/Tax Fraud!" warning in the Sale Notification email we send you, so you can examine the discrepancy and decide how to handle the situation yourself. BTW, this is similar to the situation with all PayPal sales up until a couple years ago, when they finally implemented a recalculation callback routine, so we'll be pressing 2CO to add support for something similar.
We also looked into implementing 2CO's new "Direct Checkout" payment panel (sans address fields) that would appear as an overlay in our own address-collection page, similar to how our cart works inside your site. However, not only were we unable to get this working well enough for testing before the Nov. 20th deadline due to technical conflicts, there's also a serious limitation to this method which would make it unsuitable for us and our sellers anyway.
That limitation was, if a given buyer's browser happens to block third-party cookies (as many people do for security/privacy concerns, and as modern browsers increasingly do by default, including Safari and now Firefox), this Direct Checkout payment panel would only work at all if that seller had selected the "Given links back to my site" return method in 2CO, rather than the auto-redirecting Header Redirect method we'd prefer. Not only would the Given Links method fail to auto-redirect buyers to their thank-you/download page after payment, but if the buyer neglected to click that return link after their payment had already been completed, 2CO would never send any order details back to our system at all, so our system would then have no way of knowing the order had actually been placed and paid-for vs., say, abandoned during checkout.
