This issue here as a reminder that this work needs to be done at some point (there's also a ticket for this in PyFITS' tracker). Currently PyFITS/astropy.io.fits has its own custom array class for representing FITS table data. Since FITS tables do have a few "special" features it will probably still be necessary to have a special class specifically for FITS tables, though for the sake of consistency it should at least be based on the Astropy Table class (which is a lot cleaner and more usable than what PyFITS currently has anyways).

This won't be doable for the first release--it's a big change and will be very difficult, if not impossible, to implement in a backwards compatible manner. For the first release it's probably better that astropy.io.fits (not to mention the pyfits legacy shim) work as a drop-in replacement for PyFITS.

This work will also have to be backported to PyFITS, so I'll want to tie it to an eventual PyFITS release.