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Some thoughts:-
The hardware is only just starting to be ready for prime time. The Sony Reader is only available in the US, the Iliad costs over $850 over here (in the UK). Yes the displays are very nice but you are playing a heck of a premium for them - the functionality of the ereaders is very, very limited in comparison with say a PDA (eg never mind being able to use the web on a Sony Reader, you have to convert html documents to Sony format!). If the reader sold at $100 and read all of the available formats (or at least the basics - pdf, mobipocket, html, text, rtf, Word) and has some pda functionality - well I might be interested.
I don't know whether the future is a super-gizmo that doubles as a phone, MP3 player, video player, GPS and eReader, or separate devices for all or some of these functions - probably a combination of the two.
I know people have rightly made the point about the limited range of content, but equally the content available as eBooks does seem to be a lot wider than it was even a couple of years ago. More and more computer books are available in pdf (paper computer manuals are now more or less extinct). Lonely Planet are making available more of their travel guides available. I'm sure the same is true of a lot of other areas of publishing - at least where the books are big and bulky, the content is for reference, and needs updating at regular intervals.
It's interesting that in the pdf e-Book market publishers have gone down the route of 'social DRM' ie the content is clearly marked as for the (named) purchaser's individual use - a much simpler solution than locking to devices. SFAIK it is as effective as more complicated 'proprietary' solutions.
As far as handheld devices are concerned the ePub standard has got to be the key. I think the mobipocket is a great piece of software ( the look up and annotation facilities for example are just really slick) but I very much doubt publishers ae going to want to replicate what has happened with iTunes and the market for legal music downloads (though that said you wonder what would have happened if it hadn't been for the success of iTunes).
I suspect that publishers will start to jump on the bandwagon once there is an easy way to repurpose content as an e-Book that doesn't tie them into one route to the market. Hopefully Amazon will put its weight behind eBooks - eg a big button 'Want it now?' or whatever, as well as promoting the general advantages of eBooks over pBooks for many types of book.
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