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DRM is a bad thing because it limits what you can do with something you've bought and paid for. Imagine you buy a paper book and you can only read it in your living room; if you take it to the bedroom, the cover won't open. If you move to a new house, you have to throw out all your books and buy new ones because they're limited to your old living room. That's DRM.
In an ebook-specific example, let's say you own a Kindle, and you've bought DRM-restricted books for it. All is well and good until something very bad happens involving your Kindle and a bubble bath. You see a sale on Sony Readers and decide to buy one of those instead. So you buy it, take it home, and ... can't read your books. They're all in Kindle format, and because they're DRM-restricted, you can't convert them to any other format. You bought them, you paid for them ... but you can't actually read them anymore. And, depending on the exact device, it may even be possible for the corporation that sells it to be able to turn off your ability to read DRM-restricted books at all.
Being able to lend your books to your friends would be a good thing (friends handing me a paper book and saying "you have to read this!" led me to many of my favorite authors, and a lot of sales for those authors) but that's not the really controversial part, nor is the blatant violation of the right of first sale. It's the fact that where, when, and how you can read your books are under someone else's control and that "someone else" does not have your best interests at heart. Or the best interests of anyone else except short-term stock speculators who want their stock price to go up next quarter, or next week.
It's also about platform lock-in. If you have a Kindle, Amazon wants to make you buy another Kindle; if you have a Sony Reader, Sony wants to make you buy another Reader; etc., etc. If they want to force you to upgrade from a perfectly good device, they can (though they haven't so far) refuse to allow you to authorize any more books for your old one. So not only can you only read that book in your living room, but every few years, you have to buy a new couch.
DRM is about platform lock-in. It's about forced obsolescence. It's about the end of the used book market, when "book" doesn't mean it's made of paper anymore. What it isn't about is anything that is in any way beneficial to the person actually buying the books.
Fight with your wallet. Friends don't let friends buy DRM-restricted ebooks.
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