The ability to gift Kindle books has been in place for years. It was a USA only thing for a long time, and it still is limited to certain countries. And you can't gift a book from the US site to another country's site.
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Note some so called ebooks don't work on actual eink Kindles, or maybe not on older ones but only on Kindle Apps (or the Fire, which is really a crippled "locked to Amazon" Android tablet with a pre-installed Kindle App).
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This isn't really correct. There are Print Replica Kindle books, which are usually textbooks, or books with mathematical symbols etc which won't render well or correctly on small e-ink screens. They generally work on color devices with larger screens, like the Fires, or via the Kindle app on Android or iOS devices. Books with color photos, or maps, etc. also do not always look great on a small greyscale screen, again, due to the nature of the screens.
This has nothing to do with Amazon locking you to them. It has to do with the formatting of the books, which is decided on and handled by the publisher, and is many times due to the features and content of the book itself.
I've been using Kindles since 2009, and read a variety of fiction and non-fiction, and have never run into this issue. The vast majority of Kindle books work just fine on an e-ink screen.