I'm trying to find a way to permanently transfer attributes from a given source to an object in a manner that would allow me to delete the original object and yet retain the attributes that were transferred on the object they were transferred to.

One of a few scenarios I have in mind is this: Imagine you have an object, imported from a different program, on which some attributes have been painted, but, for some reason, the topology of the object needed to be changed and now I need to update houdini with the new topology, transferring the existing attributes to the new geo. I can, of course, use the attribute transfer node to do this but I don't want to have to keep the source geo around in my scene, bogging down my nodegraph and creating a nuisance of external dependencies to keep in play and keep track of. The situation gets worse when you consider the possibility of having to do this several times. So, I want to permanently bake the attributes to the new geo and then remove the old geo from the scene. Is there any way to do this?

what you want is to simply cache the geometry with the updated attribute, houdini being a procedural tools, any network you create will only compute the geometry for the lifespan of your houdini session, everytime you reload your scene, the whole network will have to cook again.

you probably want to think in term of intermediate network, get your source geometry (from the other dcc), get the target geometry you want to transfert the attribute to, use the transfert attribute node, and then cache the result on disk as a new version of your original target geometry.
then you simply load that new version on your main network.

on a side note, you could also use a stash node which will save the entire content of the geometry directly into the houdini scene, but that will make the hip file bigger and longer to load, and you run the risk of that stash node being deleted by mistake (and that tend to happen a lot).

at the end of the day, houdini is more of an operating system for 3D rather than a DCC like maya/blender/3dsmax with bunch of predefined tool, you build your own tool, your own pipeline, your own logic. there isn't any right or wrong, go with what is the most comfortable for you. (however some way might be more efficient than other)

Thanks for all that, SciTheSqrl. The stash node is especially good to know about as, at this time, we have only very light integration of houdini into our pipeline with no official way to publish many uniquely houdini outputs like .bgeo caches and custom hda's. Until we do, the stash node might be the best way to go in some scenarios as the alternative is to put those external files in a location that isn't managed by pipeline.

Anyway - thanks again!