As a DR1000 owner I'd like to chime in. I originally bought it to read PDFs. I have a lot and it does that very well. I have an Iliad2 that I was planning on using for general reading as it's smaller and easier to carry, but I've ended up putting that in the closet where it's been since I got the DR.
I'm really happy with mine. Is it perfect? No, but I wasn't expecting it to be. I think a lot of people end up having high expectations or are expecting it to be something else.
It's one of the very few large format readers. It allows you to annotate PDFs. How many other readers do that?
I'm never really that far away from a power outlet so the battery life isn't a huge issue for me. Even with saying that, though, I get several days of use out of it before I really need to recharge it.
Overall, I really enjoy my DR. I even started using it for my general reading because I'm a pretty fast reader and with the big screen I get a lot of text so I can read longer before having to flip pages.
As to other readers coming out, there will always be newer models on the horizon. The question you have to answer is do I need it now or can I wait and see if the next model will do what I want? If I had waited before getting my DR, I would likely still be on the sidelines
