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It really depends what your primary use for a page number is. If it's simply to tell you how far through the book you are, then sure, device-dependent methods work absolutely fine, and can very easily and quickly be calculated based on current choice of font face and size.
If, however, you want to use a page number to tell someone else whereabouts in a book something is (as I have to in my essays for my Egyptology degree, for example), then you need a device-independent method of numbering pages which doesn't vary with screen size, font size, etc. The Kindle does this by mapping positions in an ebook to page numbers in a specific paper edition; ADE does it by assigning a page number to an arbitrary number of characters in a book. The way it's done doesn't matter: what does matter is that "page n" on my reading device or app takes me to (roughly) the same position in the book as "page n" does on yours.
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