I don't think that comparing Kobo pricing to Kindle daily deals are all that fair. 99% of those deals are limited to the US in any case.
I have to agree with Billingsgate. I'm in the same situation with that $2 surcharge, hence the reason I don't use a Kindle. I actually did a
price comparison for a bundle of books (prices are converted to my local currency but you'd get the idea). Aside from 1 title Kobo was the cheapest on all the books. On average
Amazon was 20% more expensive than Kobo. This also didn't take any coupon codes into account which would put Kobo in the lead by a far larger margin.
Something interesting I spotted was that Amazon only seemed competitively priced on new releases, on backlist titles they were considerably more expensive.
Most of the alternative stores selling epubs don't cater to my region so didn't include them in the comparison.