The justification is only on the pre-loads. I loaded other books onto it and they were fully justified. My mother prefers the text to not be justified if she has the option so I did the stylesheet hack on all the books I gave her to get around the font-scaling issue, but a regular book you load yourself *should* be justified.
I agree that it's slower than the Kindle. And I use text to speech a LOT, so for me the Kindle was better. But the Kobo is much lighter and sleeker, so there's that
If you want a budget reader *now* and don't want to wait six weeks, or don't like the Kobo altogether, the Aluratek Libre is another option, and it's on sale for $149 at Future Shop right now.