I've never paid much attention to any of the big news outlets opinions of e-books or readers.
As mentioned on an earlier thread, more often then not, they pay moreattention to what the PR hacks say and less to the actual product. And they hardly ever appear to have actually used the device in question
And while I agree that the Price is more expensive then the Kindle, you do get what you pay for, and the 700 does look a lot better. Add the Capability of the touch screen, and the inherent flexibility of the soft keyboard compared to hard buttons which means that Sony could easily drop in more options without having to worry about what buttons already exist.
I'm thinking that Sony is actually planning for the International market with this. After all, how much easier is it to add a soft keyboard / options for a foreign language then it would be to get region specific hardware key's.
The wireless would have been nice, but internationally, 3G is a pain, and Wifi while simple for geek's like us is not that easy to configure for most people.