F# lists with sequence operators

Question

After having a look at these two threads: Does F# have an equivalent to Haskell's take? , Take N elements from sequence with N different indexes in F# , I've been wondering about the best way to use sequence operators on lists or even if using them.

I am at the moment a newbie at F# and I'm writing a program which has to deal with lots of sequences that I get from HtmlAgilityPack. There are some interesting operators in the Seq module but as stated in those threads, it might be poor related to performance and if we are obliged to constantly converting between seq -> list it also clutters code with things that are not problem-solving... which is why I started learning F# in the first place.

A simple example is when I need to take 'N' elements of a list:

               listOfRows
               |> Seq.take 2
               // Now I don't have a list anymore, it returns a sequence
               |> List.ofSeq

So, could anyone shed some light about the best way to deal with these scenarios? I can work solutions using Seq.take and Seq.skip but this is known to be very inefficient. On the other hand it's a shame to have the functionality built into the standard library and having to reimplement it for using the same concept on a different collection, or make the code dirtier with explicit conversions.

How could I see the performance impact each conversion between 'list -> seq' and 'seq -> list' has?

Thanks a lot.