If only the iLiad had search facilities, it would beat the Kindle hands down as an academic ebook reader, because you can scribble all over the pages (at least in PDFs). But with no searching, and no bookmarks, it's fine for reading journal articles, but useless for longer texts because it takes forever to find anything. No point being able to underline important passages if you have to keep a separate note somewhere else of what page the passage was on!
This is is from experience of six months iLiad use as a history student. I used it for making notes in lectures, and storing and reading short articles, but for longer things (such as old books downloaded from Early English Books Online) I was forced to use my laptop.
The iLiad hardware has so much untapped potential...