Hmm, all of this is possible through a web browser. This reminds me of that New York Times reader Microsoft did. The basic premise seems to be - lock down the content. That didn't work for the music industry, I doubt it'll work for the dead tree publishing industry either over the long term.
I picked up a cheapola one at Best Buy from HP to play with. Win7 made it easy to use but the hardware wasn't very well designed. Maybe apple will come out with something slick and force the pc guys to innovate on design in the space. I think time we'll all have one of these sitting on the coffee table.