I'm there with you, Motu...
As a very satisfied long-time amazon customer (excellent customer service!), they might have very easily won me over as to doing my ebook purchases with them, once I decided to check out the ebook world. But I simply cannot tolerate a company's policy to try to impose their own format by sheer market dominance while there is an industry standard the remaining players have agreed upon. I am well aware of the fact that wallet-wise, I shoot myself in my own foot quite a bit
by deciding to go epub/Sony. Before making the final decision between Kindle/PRS-T1/Kobo, I assembled a (not necessarily representative...) spread sheet containing ebook prices for my favorite books as listed by the major ebook stores I probably would be willing to entrust my future purchases to. On the bottom line, Amazon was cheaper by roughly 20%... But again, I couldn't accept to be tied to one single shop/proprietary ecosystem only. And I agree with you, I am not very comfortable with rooting, either. I rather prefer not to mess with my reader's default state...