Free or Paid? HTML 5 or Flash? To Apple or Not?

Over the weekend, I got to test drive the Apple iPad with 64G (wifi and 3G). I did not switch on 3G service yet.
Disclosure: I am a big fan of the Apple design, user friendly design and don't own any stock of Apple.
That said, after the initial oohs and aahs from the family and friends, I tried to put on all my favorite stuff on the tablet. Music - check; Photographs - not check; PDFs - check; personal email accounts - check; personal calendars - check; personal contacts - uncheck; work email - uncheck;
My personal style is to have everything in one place and Apple attempts to make an admirable effort in that direction.
I love reading- so I imagined this would be a great hub. Fat chance.
Amazon with its Kindle app and Apple with its iBooks have are building 'Books' portals for themselves.
The number of books available on iBooks is miniscule compared to the availability on Kindle.
This is where they end. There is competition for them in the form of other readers which have much better Digital Rights Management (DRM) capability. Why is this important?
There are 9000 titles available in eBook format which I can download to any computer that supports the DRM control. With this feature, the local public library allows its membership card holders to reserve, download and read these eBooks for the specified duration. After that, the DRM is 'expired'. So what? Well - it does not work on Kindle , it does not work on iBooks because neither of them support the DRM control.

Whether it is Apple or Kindle (owned by Amazon) who figure this out first - they will get to control a much larger user base because - now - even library books can be downloaded to your [insert your platform].
Apple iPad is going the HTML5 way. Amazon with its first mover advantage and a larger publisher base - still does not have a footprint in this area.
Imagine - the thousands of public libraries - you can download the library book to your device, read it for the duration - renew it or just let the loan period expire. It probably would make more people read more books.

How would the commercial portals - Kindle or iBooks make money? Licensing fee from libraries. Increase in the user base. Advertisements. Preview of new books. Suggestions of new books to read that are not yet on the library book shelves.

For now, I test drove the iPad. My family is driving the iPad because - I am not interested in paying for books every week - when I can get them for free from the library; I can't get multiple calendars to sync to one device; I cant add multiple photo albums to the iPad without tearing my hear out. I got my iPod (second gen) that keeps me humming !!! I will probably Apple but not today. Where is its user friendly interface?
In case you are wondering - I did the obligatory visit to the Apple store - and no use there.

What are your thoughts? Let me know if you have figured out a solution to any of the challenges that I faced. After all, there must be an App for that.