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Personally I favor the word count method. I don't agree at all that there is some kind of aesthetic problem. In fact, I've always hated the whole page count concept in books because rarely are two books' page "value" equal whether it be because of lots of paragraph breaks, font sizes, margins, paper size, etc. page count has always been fairly meaningless in books, paper or otherwise.
Word count is used in an industry where judging length of content is far more important than casual reading of books. I'm speaking of course of media industries like radio or television. It's important to be able to estimate the time it will take to read a copy with relative accuracy. This is done almost universally by word count. Clearly word count has its own flaws, where you have 1 vs. 7 syllable words but in any work of meaningful length that averages out quite quickly, whereas in a book, the page size vs. another book's page size will never reach equilibrium because it will not change throughout the course of a book.
At any rate, there's obviously going to be some kind of... nostalgia for aspects of paper books for people who have read their whole life. I just hope we can all realize how meaningless those elements really were and smile at the potential progress on offer with eBooks as we look forward.
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