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I think there's a reluctance to expose users to 'complexity' in terms of font selection and other design choices (justification, hyphenation etc.), for which most people have no expertise or interest, but it may be such features will come along later. These are all first generation applications.
On Kindle, there's the opposite issue: 'Topaz' format is notorious for having embedded fonts that look like crap (though some look ok), which Kindle and the various Kindle apps dutifully display. As a user I wish I could override a bad design decision (or more likely lack thereof), and substitute a different font, but I can't.
Given that epub allows embedded fonts, I think a reading system should do its best to respect that and show what the designer intended, by rendering the embedded fonts (if possible). In some cases that may give a result that is not optimal for the display, or that a user finds unattractive, in which case there should be a simple way for users to substitute a system font for at least the embedded font used for the main text. Substitution is not guaranteed to give a better result, but seems preferable to a system that offers no flexibility about it.
At this point, however, seems all we can do is discuss what could or should be.
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