So, do you think they actually just dropped the extra frames? I always through there must have been more to the conversion than that or it would have been even choppier looking. I can't find any information on it anywhere though - it's always just articles about how awful the 48fps looks but never an explanation of how they did the conversion to 24fps.
It's interesting to note, that while I haven't seen the Hobbit at 48fps, I saw some other videos at this frame-rate and I always got the soap opera feel from them but not so from 60fps videos - those actually looked awesome to me - I guess 60fps is so close to what we're actually seeing in real life, that it just looks good, while 48fps still registers as fake, but in a different way than we're used to with 24fps, which we taugth our brains to perceive as the movie look, 48 fps rather reminds our brains of the native 30fps of soap operas, or sped up footage.