I hope they do get this out soon.

My background is very far afield from computer science, but it seems to me that annotation shouldn't be a huge issue. Based on what you all have said, it sounds like highlighting may be the problem... I mean, it doesn't even work super smoothly in portrait mode. Maybe they could release landscape functionality allowing for hand-written annotation, and upgrade with highlighting somewhere in the future. That would solve many of my problems... at least with the eDGe