One major selling point an LCD-based device will have is the speed of its display. While totally unimportant for continues reading of a single book, it comes into play as soon as you want to browse through books or even navigate a menu. I love reading on my eReader, but I hate the slow process of switching books, getting to the right page, etc. The Nook tries to solve this by adding a specialised display to handle just that (or so I believe, I am unsure it uses the LCD for all non-reading tasks) but that just makes the device bigger - a tricky trade-off. While LCD has many disadvantages, a spiffy, fast interface can make all those seem unimportant.
If Apple were indeed to sell a sleek tablet device (like
this for example) it could seriously dampen spirits in the eInk corner. Consider this for example: I have an MP3 player which lets me load any music I want, does not demand any software installed on my PC, which has more internal space than most iTouch versions, which weights considerably
less then an iTouch and while battery life is about equal, it uses a single AAA battery instead of a built-in non-replacable accu so with a few spares it lasts much, much longer than an iTouch - not to mention it is about 6 times cheaper. Yet while everyone I meet seems to know what an iPod touch / iPhone is, nobody even recognises the brand of my MP3 player. I find it a frightening example of how much a device which is inferior in almost every way
for that particular purpose can completely own a market.
Mark my words, in two years time we will not be calling our devices eReaders anymore, no, just like people now ask to see our 'kindles' will we then be asked about our iPads or whatever it might be called
