kilopounds feels like a weird bastard but I think it makes sense. The actual values of the metric system are just as arbitrary as US Custom/Imperial (a particular mass, 1/10,000,000 part of the quarter of a meridian, such and such hyperfine transitions in a arbitrary atom, &.) The value of the metric system is decimalization -- the centi-, kilo-, mega- prefixes. Really, if americans ditched miles and tonnes and stuck to kilofeet and megapounds the systems would not be meaningfully different.

On the other hand, having your prime factors be 2 and 3 rather than 2 and 5 are nice when you divid things into quarters and thirds regularly (inches).