You do realize that zooks have a ONE HUNDRED percent chance to penetrate the rear armor of a panther at all ranges, right? If you're blitzing in to flank something with your Panther, you'll easily be exposing your rear armor to zooks.
Yes, people don't always have them - I actually think they're a little too expensive fuel-wise. Just wanted to point out the obvious flaw in your statement. They are in fact a threat to all Ost armor except for the Tiger (because of higher rear armor than the panther)
Really wanna know where your arbitrary claim of 40% chance for Panther to beat an Is-2 is coming from. It's pretty much a 0% chance for the Panther to score a kill on an Is-2 if a ZiS gun is around, or if the Soviet knows that his munitions can be used to plant mines.
If it is an actual 1v1, with no interference - which will never happen - the Panther has a 100% chance of beating the Is-2 as long as it has an infantry unit spotting for it. Probably a 0% chance of winning in a vacuum 1v1 (doesn't mean anything though).
Same exact logic applies to Jackson vs Tiger.
Except IS-2 and ISU-152 are the only tanks, that Panther actually need to flank to reliably penetrate, and these tanks are Soviet, and Soviets don't have zooks.
USF have zooks, but Panther doesn't need to flank USF armor to reliably penetrate it.