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Of course Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and (to some extent) Sony gladly make some profit on the hardware.
Samsung, developing and manufacturing most of its components, should be highly profitable in the hardware arena as well.
But clearly the potential, at least for revenue but in mid term for profit as well, is in the content.
Studies say, Amazon is taking a loss on lots of books for $ 9.99.
Why should they accept this, if not for market share? If they are willing to sponsor for now, obviously there has to be huge potential in this area in the future.
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Interesting, and understandable theory. But for the sake of discussion: The "why" is already answered with their current profit off hardware. Amazon's Kindle revenue is primarily from hardware sales and they are doing well with it. This is not a situation like with gaming console manufacturers, where they took hardware losses in order to establish revenue from licensing and content.
Yes, Amazon may be hopefully speculating on a future change of the playing field that allows them to also profit from content, and conducting themselves partially with this in mind. However, they don't need it. Considering the current attitude of the publishing industry and Amazon's battles with them, it is very unlikely that content revenue is something Amazon is banking on as their primary goal. It could be Plan B, but Plan A is working fine.
Notice that every e-book Amazon doesn't have to pay for, they offer free. So they take a loss on books they do have to pay for, and give away the ones they don't.
An example of products sold with the intent of revenue from licensing:
Apple iPhone: 6% markup
Sony Playstation: -12% (loss)
Kindle: 48% markup. It's not as high as some electronics but it certainly is not the behavior of a product meant to profit from auxiliary revenue. As it stands, Amazon's approach is geared towards profiting from Kindle sales, and it's working. When you purchase a Kindle, you've done your share for Amazon's bottom line without ever purchasing an ebook.