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Brief preface: the Kobo "page turn tap" seems to work really well; no swiping required. It's a knack, but you master it quickly; just as you did the funny square ring navi pad of the K3 which the first few times seemed awkward. I can easily turn pages tapping with the side of my right thumb.
It has taken four years of development and we've come to a happy place: always connected via "free" wifi; touch screen; deep libraries of books to purchase in Kindle and ePub; Pearl screen; evolution to an "ideal" form factor somewhere in the single-page quality paper book dimension; light-weight; long battery life; pretty much no brainer every day usage including purchase flow. Not bad. I expect "customer satisfaction" for today's mainstream ereaders is pretty high -- great tools and priced affordably with "all the bells and whistles" available for under $150.
Lots can still be done: better screens; colour; variations for picture books and magazines without needing to go whole hog to tablets; better on device content management; enhanced text-to-speech; enhanced notation and shared notations; much deeper social media integration; on device on the fly translation; faster processors ... lots of goodies to come.
Hopefully, in the eink end of the spectrum, the industry will keep an eye on Kobo. Their schtick has been: Simple. At first that meant small feature set but barely a year later they have dramatically enhanced the ereader and the Kobo platform without sacrificing Simple. Amazon has done a great job with Kindle 3 yet to get to some additional features is not as simple.
In short: we've got to a great place and there is almost certainly more to come. I suspect 24 months from now we'll be applauding the progress of 2012 and 2013 even in the eink end of ereaders.
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