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Carpetmojo,
For any ebook viewer (hardware or software), the various display settings (margins, font size, text justification, etc) makes the use of page numbers ambiguous as a meaningful reference point. By altering these settings the user could go to either extreme: a single letter on a page, or thousands of words on a page. Thus creating a problem with continuing to use page numbers, in general, as a reference point.
However, there are still more physical books than ebooks in the world at present and there has to be some way to try and create a matching reference point for discussion and citation purposes. So page numbers are still being used for ebooks, but they're implemented in a "fuzzy logic" manner: an ebook page size is approximated.
Obviously this is not an optimal citation method. This probably won't change for another decade until ebooks have reached about 60% saturation in the public (library), private and commercial markets, worldwide. Thereafter something more akin to calibre's reference method (chapter and paragraph numbering) might prove more useful as it's dependent on data, not location. Since data is cheap to maintain, full bibliographic citations are more likely, along with a quote, to make syncing reference points between various editions easier -- particularly paper editions.
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