Jackie,
Thanks for the warning about coming from Kindle. I do understand that, thankfully. From what I've read, I think most of the differences are things that I will appreciate. The main reasons I hadn't moved to Kobo sooner were a bit of amazon fangirlism and the fact that I had built a big library on the Kindle and didn't get have a good reason to move. But, recently I've been unhappy with some of Amazon's choices of how to do things, and Kobo seems to consistently get those same things right (IMHO).
That is a good suggestion to load a kepub and a straight epub to see how they behave differently. I do know that I want the reading life features, though, and iirc, those are only available with kepub, right? I will try things out, though, and see how I like each of them.