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The problem with implementing something like "pages" (meaning either screens, which change with each font change, or static pages, which represent x amount of text no matter how many screens they cover) is that someone is sure to wrongly believe that the page numbers correspond to a print edition, which they don't and won't. So it won't really solve any problems -- not in academia, not in book clubs or church study groups. It will just give the emotional comfort of something familiar, without really solving any of the problems of a separate ebook edition. I think it would make matters worse, not better -- bookmarks and syncing across devices would both become less accurate.
The only way to make old-fashioned page numbers useful on an ebook reader is to correspond them to pages in some print edition of the same book, which would require hard-coding in the text itself. No matter what screen you were on, a bracketed page number would be inserted at the hard copy page break. (This is what the legal community does with Lexis and Westlaw.) But considering how much publishers have failed at even basic formatting and proofreading, it's hard to imagine many of them would take this on, or if they did, do it well.
Locations are a big change from page numbers, but they are actually more accurate in the ebook context. Amazon did a good thing by not calling them page numbers, but instead adapting a new paradigm that's more useful for the ebook platform.
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