Well the tone of the discussion is going rapiditly down here
I'd appreciate if it could all be nice again like I'm used to and enjoy on mobileread.. Maybe the arguments are not irrelevant for others?
And yes I agree on your main point. I would like to add: eReaders are a luxury good right now, not a social "must-have" like for example in certain disciplines on the academy a notebook is. Instead of assessing probabilities of future device to decide if you want to buy something now: if you currently can't afford one without having a painful hit on your budget, of course do not buy one, ragardless of what you think might come or not. If you want a new gadget to play with and you can affort it, buy one now. An eReader is just a nice to have, with the current infrastructure it rarly safes you money, like a scenario when eBooks would be really much cheaper... For me the iLiad was a graduation present, and since graduation was a fixed moment in time, waiting was understandable not an option. As society changes, maybe eReaders will be a must have in certain disciplines, like cars/tvs were once luxury too and are now standard devices. I'm nosy to see which discipline will be the first, but right now there just aren't any.
The "I want it now" factor and "lets wait somewhat" factor is and must stay highly subjective, and cannot be objectively answered to somebody asking what to do. A funny annotation is In classic economics, they do calculate a "I want it now" factor into the actors, or else due to interests, you would always get more of the same money next year, and a rational acting actor would never buy anything except what he needs to survive now.
It also depends what is important to you, for example I guess for you its mostly screensize and price. For somebody else the scribble might be an important factor too, for some (like me) open to development is very important, since I want to add additional applications to the device. As far I can tell from the current announcements, there is no other scribbable, open-to-development device on the horizont than the iLiad. If screensize is important I'd might wait for the new A4 Hanlin, since it is developed by a company already in the market, I consider it much more likely than a newcomer, but it certainly will be closed. Price is afaik yet unknown.