Thanks for your replies. Yes, I'm in the U.S. (Los Angeles), so testing a Kobo first hand is difficult.
IR touch:
Do you think there's much difference between the IR touch and capacitive touch experience?
Screen front light:
You mentioned it's hard to judge front light differences with GeR reviews. Between independent review videos, yes. But in their head to head comparison videos - or anyone else's, for that matter - it does seem clear to me that there's a difference, with the Kobos being a bit whiter. I would guess this has to do with a capacitive layer on Kindles. I think others have made this guess as well. I place significant value on a whiter screen.
But as you say, yes, they vary quite a bit from unit to unit.
The fingerprint thing is one of the smaller factors, for sure. The paperwhite has the most matte-quality rubberized plastic between the Kindles (only in person tests I can do).
Yes, it seems to me the most important things that I value would be the whiteness of the screen itself, as well as typography control. All of this seems great on the Kobos, with a couple of exceptions: I would want to remove all extraneous spacing between paragraphs that you see on some books on Kobos; and I would want to remove the header and footer that Kobo displays. The header is really OK, but from some videos I've seen, the footer management sometimes results in gigantic whitespace regions at the bottom of the page. It seems like a huge waste of space. There was one video I watched where someone commented that they disliked this also, but that they had found something where they could place a special file on their Kobo and that file made a new configuration (check box) option appear in the settings that allowed you to disable this stuff. Do you know what he's talking about and where to find that? Like I said, the header with the title isn't so bad, but the footer - at least in the worst case - is rather disconcerting.
Aside from those last two points, I'm OK with using Calibre to remove paragraph spacing and stuff. I plan to manage my books there anyway.
Good to here that I probably won't encounter many issues with DRM. As long as I have the flexibility to get books from sources other than Kobo on the Kobo, I'm not concerned.
Library borrowing:
Yes, Kindle works for that here. But from my research, apparently Kobo does as well. Overdrive shows that my local library has ePubs, too.
Thanks for the tip of staying away from B&N books. As for iBooks - I already stay away from Apple completely
Oh, and yes I actually called up a store around here that was listed on Kobo's site as one of the "indie" bookstores that carried Kobos. Nope, no Kobos to be found.
So it kind of seems to me if I have no concerns getting other books onto a Kobo (e.g. Amazon books, when required), if I can remove the header and footer (or at minimum, just the footer), then Kobo might be the way to go. Because it wins for me in typography, screen whiteness (well, I *think* - so it seems), openness, and Pocket. Pocket support is really one of the big pulls for me.
I'd be sacrificing mostly Xray and newspaper and magazine (Economist - basically a text-centric magazine) functionality for this. I don't know for sure how much of the newspaper/magazine subscription I'd end up doing. I could find it's awesome, or I might not go for it much. On the flip side, I'll definitely use Pocket. As for Xray, this is really cool and nice to have, but only for certain types of books would it be extremely handy. Game of Thrones is a perfect example - I'm only on book one (and not sure how much of a fan I am yet). For other types of books, this is really cool, but probably not required. Oh, and well, yes also sacrificing a better store. It's kind of cool that you see all the reviews there for Amazon. But a better store comes at the expense of your device looking like a store. So I'm prepared to toss that point away. I can research online on a separate device or in a bricks and mortar store, I guess. Always nice to browse and stroll around. And, if I'm going Kobo, I'll be managing in Calibre - which is on my computer anyway.
Hmm. I think I'm definitely trying to convince myself of Kobo (without having ever touched one), but it's mostly the typography/layout unknowns and extra research that hasn't gotten me there yet.