There is currently a partial lobste.rs mirror hosted at typed-hole.org over gemini (as well as gopher). Gopher also has gopherpedia which mirrors wikipedia (many clients for gemini also support gopher). While I dont think mirroring should be the end goal, I agree it is a good stepping stone to original content to have , as you put it, low-distraction access to these resources.

Recent work has gone on to allow git cloning over gemini and there is syntax support for the, admittedly minimal, text/gemini format in vim and emacs.

I would love to see pandoc support (and believe someone recently mentioned working on on the mailing list). Great ideas! Pick one and build!