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apple had minimal investment in adapting their already working DRM to protect ebooks. the benefit for them was huge (maintain control) and the are not tied to another companies technology. if you look at the history of apple they do not license out others technology. do you even know where the itunes application came from? i'm an original purchases of soundjam. which apple bought up and made into the application you use today. no. apple would never license adept from adobe and pay them royalties for years to come, nor anyone else and their DRM scheme. and why should they? it makes no business sense to apple.
also, as many have pointed out, users of this forum are focused on the ebook capabilities of the device. that is just one segment compared to everything else apple wants people to do with this device. music from itunes. movies from itunes. television shows form itunes. applications and games from itunes. apple is going to make far more money off of those segments than just ebooks. so they put in minimal investment, wrap it up in their own DRM, and get a bunch of publishers on-board. would we have cared much if sony came out and said "yes our latest artists play fine on the ipad" or dreamworks said "you can watch our latest movies on the ipad"? no. yawn. nothing new to see here. apple did have to show off ebooks because it's new for apple, and to show they've got yet another media segment to start peddling to the masses. (personally i think the itunes store is in desperate need of a rebrand. movies? applications? books? and it's still called iTunes? huh?) apple had to show off ebooks because to not show a tablet device and not show off books would have made people wonder why apple was missing a natural segment.
this device is a media player and apple wants to push media in any format it can so it can make money off of all of it. plain and simple.
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