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Now that KT has landscape, I'll probably never attempt conversion of PDF again. It's perfectly usable for the PDFs I want to read or have on my Kindle for reference, and as for the rest, I'll find some other device to read them on. Not ideal, but better than spending a couple of hours converting things that weren't meant to be converted in the first place.
And on screens bigger than 7" or so, one can start to appreciate how bad ebook typography still is by comparison, and how little text reflow adds to the reading experience (comparing well-formatted examples of each). What I've found lacking are mobile apps with full-featured PDF support, which makes it more frustrating than it should be. But apps will improve (the lastest release of Adobe Reader for iOS and Android now support much more of the functionality of the desktop counterparts).
Publishers frustrated by this have turned to fixed-layout variants of ePub and now KF8. It's pretty ironic, when PDF can accomplish most of the same functions with more interoperability, ease of creation, mature authoring tools, and infinite design options. Perhaps ideal would be an ebook format that can combine fixed-layout and reflowable sections, but that doesn't exist yet.
So I do consider PDF a sort of ebook format, or at least I appreciate it when the devices I use for reading to support it in some workable fashion. It's not going away any time soon, and serves many purposes that today's other digital formats cannot.
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