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Welcome to the Forum!
I'll try to answer some of your questions:
The V2 runs LINUX and is planning to release an SDK, so developing Software should be possible. Different Font sets are planned as well, but I'm not sure when/how they'll be implemented. The V2 is apparently done where the Hardware is concerned, but Software is something the "Partner" all over the world willbe codeveloping apparently, so it's har to be sure what will get in and what will be left out. Viewing picture formats is possible I think, but as far as I can tell at the moment you'll have to convert them to .wol format before you can view them on the V2. Also, with 4 levels of grey, the usefullness of images is greatly reduced. Book pages in .gif format should be ok, must illustrations will probably suffer if they aren't b/w or lowlevel greyscale from the start.
About the screens and the "booklike nature" of the devices...
Nobody apart from a few librié and Hanlin V8 users can say so far. Next week several Forum members, me included, will recieve their iRex Iliad and then we'll be able to say more. So far, from the pictures I've seen it looks like the screen isn't brilliant white, it's more a very light grey. But normal book-paper isn't pure white either so that shouldn't be a problem.
There are photos of an eink screen next to a computer screen and a paper book for comparison on this forum, they should also give you a good idea. About feeling and handling...I think it'll always be a compromise, but I got used to reading from my ouny little PDA (Yakumo Delta 300) after about 2-3 hours reading, so I guess it's a question of habit.
Beyond usual bookmarks?
Annotation is a feature that is handled a bit differently in every device. The V8/V2 do it with the help of the Slave display, the iRex Iliad could handle it quite nicely with full-screen WACOM penabled touchscreen if they ever get the software to work...
At the moment it's all a little hodge-podge and not really a usefule feature in any device. Future will show...
The Chapter/Page number thing is a bit difficult to answer since I don#t really understand the question...but I think this is something that will have to be solved on the formats-reflowing and -handling front.
Footnotes and endnotes are something i'm also wondering about. I guess it's again something that would have to be handled by the makers of the ebook. Every format apart from plain .txt should be able to incorporate this, but since the contents have to be resized to fit the screen the viewers will have to be flexible enough to put the footnotes at the bottom of the correct page...should be solveable however. Doing it with "links" wouldn't be a good idea I think since that would mean a lot of jumping around (look at Terry Pratchett books, if you had to click a link for every footnote he puts in there you'd never put the stylus away...).
Hope that helped a bit.
Next week some more answers should be around when the first iRex Iliad devices start arriving and get their first scrutiny...^^
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