It's been ages since I read it and I am 99% sure I'm remember horribly wrong, but I was thinking it's something like this? Also - your "the only information" is precisely what we can measure of quantum states, so information is still preserved. That's more a limit of what we know?

I think that with Hawking radiation you have quantum entanglement of two pairs. You have a matter-antimatter pair production near the horizon. When the antimatter falls into the blackhole without being destroyed via mutual annihilation, the matter particle at the boundary now "radiates" away. HOWEVER.

The matter inside boundary which the anti-matter DOES interact with is destroyed, and the information of that interaction is is "passed" to the outside via the the anti-matter's entanglement with its co-created pair.

Something like that, isn't it? Please any physicists clarify :)