The Two Minds of Amazon on eBooks
Just because this journalist can't make any sense of things, Amazon is 'of two minds', and the entire publishing industry is 'confused'. Please. Amazon is in the business of selling/renting digital media, of course they are going to be in the thick of things with 'enhanced ebooks'. Publishers are pursuing a variety of strategies for their move to digital, but that is business as usual when you can't predict the future, not 'confusion'.
The idea and reality of 'enhanced ebooks' has been around for quite awhile (at least since CD-ROMs showed up for PC's). We've been able to embed video and audio in PDF for years (including Flash in the latest versions), and the idea is enshrined in the ePub standard (which Amazon's mobi format is closely related to). The fact that the current generation of 'dedicated' reading devices don't support consumption of such content is a reflection of lack of content, lack of demand, and lack of sufficiently powerful mobile technology, but not lack of clarity.
Kindle and other readers already provide an 'enhanced' reading experience, with instant access to dictionaries, built in web browsing, and annotation features (including Kindles new social networking features). Even in their current form, they could probably be updated to support embedded audio as well (if there was any content and or demand, which there isn't). But until requirements for dedicated devices and for general purpose tablets converge a good deal more, which will take some time, the continued existence and promotion of the former is not a reason for confusion.