The release of Mountain Lion has corrected this problem. PhotoStream will allow one to sync photos between iPhoto on a Mac and the Photos app on an iPad.
Yes, that is the new service to transfer images, but it is not exactly a replacement for syncing albums. Photostream will always only show a temporal snapshot, and also will show all of the camera roll. For me, syncing albums implies to keep two albums with selected photos synced, for more than a month and containing only the selection, not the 1000 photos in the camera roll.
I mentioned the Shared Photo streams, because they come very close to the old synced albums. A shared photo stream holds exactly the photos you selected, if you add or remove images it will be synced, and the shared stream will not erase photos after a month. You can share a shared Photo Stream to yourself, and do not need to publish it. So essentially it is a synced album.
Regards
Léonie