The pyramid was not really designed around ‘clips’ or an Ableton design… so you’re only going to get some vague appoximation.
my feeling is that the pyramid (in this performance mode) was more designed to be like a looper pedal, at least thats a workflow thats seems to work well for me on the pyramid.
as you say, the closest approximation to a clip on the pyramid is either patterns or tracks.
patterns are pretty limited to just cut n’ paste.
tracks allow things like doubling, which I find useful.
as noted in this topic pyramidi is pretty limited in what it can control.
again, more like what you might see on a looper pedal. its just augmenting the pyramids ui, not trying to replace it.