You're comparing approval favorably to IRV along dimensions related to strategic voting?

Yep. Strategic voting for IRV becomes relevant as soon as the third-ranked candidate becomes competitive, and essentially gives you first-past-the-post behavior. It's less likely to encourage strategic voting than FPTP, and this is definitely important in practice, but it still falls under the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. See, for example, http://minguo.info/election_methods/irv/

It's true that optimally setting a cut-off in approval is part of the strategy. But there is never an incentive to lie and approve a lessor-favored candidate over a more-favored one. The second is far more informationally damaging. (And I think it is sometimes easier to just measure each candidate against a cut-off rather than doing a full ranking.)

I probably wouldn't bother with Concorcet if not for the ability to use computers to do the counting. IRV is much simpler to count by hand.

I'd describe that slightly differently -- Condorcet is easier to count by hand -- it's just the pairwise races that matter. Determining the winner from the counts involves a bit of skull sweat. IRV, the counting proper needs a separate bucket for each permutation, but is easier to analyze by hand and determine the winner. YMMV, on whether this is a useful distinction.