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Near as I can tell, the anti-Kindle faction is arguing that somehow Amazon and Kindle are somehow more restrictive than the Epub options (B&N, Kobo,Sony, Apple)...and that appears to be simply untrue.
While you can (in theory) buy epub books from different vendors, the varying DRM standards and agency pricing model means that you still may not be able to read them (despite them all being in Epub, "The universal ebook format!") and there is no pricing competition.
The problem comes back to DRM; without DRM, format doesn't really matter all that much.
But also, with the advent of the Google Ebook store and Amazon's "Kindle for the Web" DRM is rendered useless because you can make a backup copy of your book by reading on your browser and taking a screen capture image of each page.
Cumbersome, time intensive, a pain...well, sure. But you can still unlock your books and keep a permanent copy in case the big bad Amazon ever goes away.
(Never mind that there are numerous non-Amazon sites where you can buy and read Mobi/Kindle format books, Baen and Smashwords being the two examples that immediately spring to mind. And as for not being able to find specific books on some sites, such as Smashwords, that's something to take up with the publisher and author, not the ebook vendor. After all, the PUBLISHER is the one that decides which vendors to offer their books to, not the ebook store.)
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