Sigh.
You're crossing the line into quibbling for the fun of it
. I'm not attached to my definition of publisher, it's just that's how I write. If you want to define "publisher" differently, you'll need to re-interpret my writing by substituting a different word where you see "publisher".
Traditionally, a book has one publisher (at a time, per territory), but is sold by many different retailers. Amazon is a retailer. (Or retail outlet, or something).
That's where I draw my terms from. If you want a heuristic that avoids the woolly and potentially changing abstractions that really define publishing, the publisher is generally the same person who paid the cover artist/designer.
I'd be surprised if you couldn't root the Amazon tablet. Amazon made friendly noises about people rooting the Kindle, despite the risk of people over-using the mobile data connection. It'd leave the Nook with an unofficial advantage, for no particularly good reason. There's a good reason for having their own appstore: it let's them avoid things like the hardware requirements for the Google-run one, which are (or were) very phone-centric.
You might be interested to see they've currently allowed
Kobo, Aldiko, and Wattpad. No guarantee... but you're right, if they do it, it'd be
great for competition.
I've also seen it claimed that the screen will improve on the standard transflective LCD... but given the physics, it's surely only a quantitative improvement.
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don't think Android tablets have as much built in blocking technology
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Sucker. I'm pretty sure some of the android phones are locked down with a "trusted platform" type system. If there are tablets made by the same people and sold with the same business model, they'll be the same.
No Apple device has bothered with that yet (they just make sure to fix the security holes that allow unauthorized rooting -- at least one of which could have lead to very damaging exploits). There's no costly blocking technology that Android is missing; if Amazon
want to have an Apple-level lockdown, it wouldn't cost them any extra.