Are you writing from the future? That post you referred "from a year ago" was posted 10/5/11, just a few days ago.
Unfortunately, I'm REALLY looking for the digital products download feature too.. it sounds like there's going to be a plugin that will give this functionality, but it's still under development. I know VM2 is just a beta RC release, but nevertheless, it's really lacking in some very important key features. It's been nothing but headache after headache working with it.