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As Kobo has already announced that their app will be available on the iPad "day one," I suspect all the eBook apps will be allowed to run. I know Apple has their iBooks store, but that's not their main moneymaker. I don't think they're going to be as protective of it as with some other lines of business. It's even a separate store-- they can drop it later if they want to, or if they get an attractive offer from one of the other ebook giants.
One thing to keep in mind regarding the iBooks store-- we have already seen that if you buy a song from iTunes, you'd better make your own backup, because iTunes does not allow you to download the song again later (even though your account history has been maintained). So I would not have any confidence that you'd be able to re-download books bought at their store.
As for the prices, the screen shot we saw had a wider range of prices than, say, Amazon, with best-sellers going to $15, but the low end looked pretty comparable to me. My understanding is that Amazon takes a loss on the bestsellers (and that the publishers don't much like that sales strategy). Apple seems to have chosen not to impose an upper cutoff on publisher-set prices. We'll see what the market says about how well that works for them.
It's not the right device for everyone, and certainly not a "Kindle Killer" (wrong market). But I think it will sell well, and not just because of the Apple brand name. It looks like a device that will meet a lot of users' needs-- a web appliance. It's not a hacker device or a hard-core gamer device, but there are plenty of other people out there who use computers and just want them to run reliably and perform a short list of functions. This will likely do that.
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