If I could actually buy the kindle (I'm in Canada) without getting completely hosed, I would.
I paid $500 for my Librie. I'd pay $500 again for the kindle if several hundreds of those dollars got rebated or subsidized by Amazon, assuming I could load my own content - it isn't like I wouldn't spend the money there *anyway*.
If there were no rebates, I couldn't load my own content, and I could buy it for $50 I'd STILL buy it, cause at that price it'll be hacked anyway...
People fighting the "Stand-alone" reader concept either don't read enough material "online" (computer/pda/etc) already, or have never used an E-ink device for any time period.
1) Laptops are way overkill - too big, too heavy, too hot, too hard to read (sunlight, backlight induced eyestrain, poor ergonoics for just *reading*). The only thing they do better would be high-res content like PDFs.
2) PDA screens are too small and low resolution. The biggest screen you'll see on a PDA is around 4", VGA resolution, and they share the poor qualities of the laptop LCD - eyestrain and readability issues. The battery life is generally better than a laptop but not great, but you can still run into heat issues. (the bigger the screen, the higher end the PDA, the bigger the processor and the more heat you get out of the backlight. How popular are LED backlights now? None of my devices have one...) PDA's also tend to be clunky and un-ergonomic for reading, even if the weight is in the right range. Add field of view issues for the LCD and it looks even worse. They are more portable and handier than the laptop, while making higher resolution content available (but usually not very well)
3) Other, like cell phones (worse *everything* than PDAs, save for portability), other ebook readers (mostly not bad, save for LCD, battery, and availability), dead tree formats (loss of convenience, bulky, not reusable, relatively expensive to print off or buy everything you'd ever read otherwise...), computer (less mobile than a laptop, uncomfortable to sit in front of for hours on end), etc
Don't get me wrong - I own several laptops, PDAs, and cellphones, and at some point I've read an electronic text on every last one of them and have done so for years. Web pages, documentation, online-only (no dead tree edition) text, books, magazines, manga - the works. Not a single one of the other readers comes anywhere close to how nice it is to read on the Librie. I still read a lot on my "other" devices, but if I have a choice, or I'm going to read for pleasure - it's now on the Librie.
So if you don't read much, have no disposable income, only read in pitch darkness,don't want to carry an extra 255gram device, or if you have no interest in anything that's only available online, it may not be the device for you.
Otherwise you'll find the reader is generally easier to read than a book (no holding pages open), most people find that the refresh doesn't bug you after using it for a while, and the size, shape, and weight beat out most other hand-held electronic devices for reading, hands down. Add that to a low-eyestrain 6" screen with a guaranteed 180degree FOV, and you've got a winner.
You just have to try it for a while to realize it.