I've been wanting a kindle for the past year, pretty much since the original kindle was released. I decided to wait for the kindle 2 because I thought it'd work out most of the kinks in the first version, and implement some nice new features.
I read quite a bit. I read a mixture of science fiction and fantasy, though mostly science fiction as I get older. At least 60% of what I read is computer books, text books, and PDF documents from work. The thought of replacing my novels wasn't really that appealing because I don't tend to have a lot in my queue. I tend to spend more time looking for new authors and series while waiting for new ones in a series I'm already reading.
The thought of replacing my computer books, text books, and PDF documents was very appealing because the first two are really heavy and bulky, I keep and refer to constantly, and PDF's are painful to read on a computer for any length of time. I was hoping the kindle would give me a good portable document reader and an improvement over flipping pages to scan for interesting topics.
Unfortunately what I found was that the kindle 2 is good for only 1 thing, reading novels. The regular old paper back books that you read 1 page at a time from front to back. It's horrible for computer books, and text books, because the screen size is tiny and you can't fit enough text on the screen to be usable. It's even worse for PDF's because you have to first convert them, much of my material is confidential, and then they usually don't render very well and are very hard to read. My iPhone is better for reading Word Docs, PDF's and looking at Powerpoint presentations despite the tiny screen size. I attribute this to the near perfect rendering support, lightning fast load and view, and the amazingly easy and intuitive zoom and pan.
The screen refresh is fine for novels, but absolutely infuriating when trying to flip back a few pages to refer to something you've just read or to use for searching. The keyboard is great for simple web searches or looking up books, but is terrible for more than extremely casual use. The buttons are tiny and far spaced making them a pain to click.
Pretty much the kindle 2 is a $400 novel reader, and you have to pay full price for the book without a discount (compared to what you can get at www.barnesandnoble.com as a member) for the electronic form. Because of this you never actually make back your $400 investment in savings for the books, despite the obviously lower print and distribution costs for the publishers. You might find a few cheap books below what the book store sells, but these are books you'll find 10 or more for 1/3rd the price at half price books and such, so there isn't any actual cost savings.
Because of all of this your just basically locking yourself into the amazon format, the inability to loan your book out, paying full price for books, and using this $400 device to read novels. If I travelled a lot for work and wanted a novel reader for travelling then it'd be a no brainer. For anything else it's also a no brainer, don't buy it.
The browse and buy function was definitely really great and worth the praise. Other than that I'm not sure why anyone would buy it unless they read ALOT of novels, travel a lot so need the remote purchase convenience, and don't have any need to read anything but standard paperback novels while traveling. For the rest of the world it's a very cool sounding, but very niche oriented product that really isn't for me.
I had a kindle 2 for a week, and then sold it on craiglist