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When Amazon was just a retailer, selling only other manufacturer's stuff, banning was a perfectly reasonable tactic. After all, if one retailer refuses your business there are plenty of others to choose from. However, now they have co-mingled their retailer business with their Kindle business. When they advertise 260K titles from the Kindle Store and when they are the only Kindle-compatible source for the vast majority of those titles, then banning a Kindle owner from Amazon is banning them from those 260K titles. The small print of their terms of service may say that they don't have to sell you those titles, but not doing so clearly reduces the value of any Kindle you may own.
When the Kindle came out I was not overly concerned about Amazon getting out of the ebook business, and thus rendering existing Kindle ebooks obsolete, even though they had done exactly this once before. It never occurred to me that Amazon could stay in the ebook business, but only for Kindle owners they "liked".
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