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I have a Kindle and an iPad. I use the Kindle for reading books for pleasure. I use the iPad and iAnnotate (mentioned in the second article) for research and reading pdf's. With iAnnotate you can email/extract a summary of just your markups -- it is very useful. iAnnotate does cost $10 in addition to the need to buy an iPad. In additions, it only reads pdf's, and I suspect you will find that most of the things you might pull from google books will be in epub.
The other advantage of an iPad is that it lets you easily move around a page. When I'm reading for research, I want to move up/down and back/forth to compare text sections. With an iPad I just touch the screen and I fluidly move the page around on the screen. I can also easily zoom in and out to focus on a section of the text.
Someone above talks about the use of Sony and it's touchscreen e-ink unit. I would love to hear from someone who has one of these to understand how it works. My impression is that no e-ink based tech will have the fluidity of an LCD approach. Any page movement or zooming would have to include a flash and then a screen redraw.
As a long-time eink user I can tell you that this flash is virtually invisible when reading a fiction book. It is no worse than the 'flash' from turning the page on a paper book. However, it would seem to preclude the ability to smoothly zoom or drag the page back and forth.
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