OP, sorry to hear that you're not happy with the iPad. You look/speak/post like a reasonable person, so my apologies for unkind posts that have been posted. for what it is worth, I think you have named some good reasons to bring back your iPad. And yes, you could have avoided it by reading/exploring a bit more in advance, but who am I to tell you (when I've spend several iPads worth of gadgets-junk that didn't work and I never got my money back for those things)?
For me, I love reading on it. The empty Spanish catalog is indeed a bit pity, but I've downloaded around 400 books in Dutch that where in epub/pdf format and added them to my iPad. That makes for quite a nice library.
Holding the ipad in front of you is tiresome, no matter how much you work out.But the same goes for a Kindle or anything else. If you need to hold it in front of you with stretched armes, it will get heavy sooner or later. I understand your reason, but even a 300gr pocket book will get heavy if you don't support it.
But the weight on the iPad is not spend useless IMHO: from all the pictures I've seen so far on Kindles, e-readers, slates etc. etc. all of them are so fragile looking, cheap plastic and the one's I've holded easily flexed under normal forces. I haul the iPad around in my bag, every day, inside an Apple case (I really need to find a better case that is just as slim, more handy and much, much more durable). But I'm never concerned it will not survive. Is that worth the extra weight? for me it is, for you it might be different.
I can reach mobile me via the goodreader and it works. Most of the time, sort of, because I just want to look up a doc/pdf. If I want to edit it, I need to email it, which isn't a very nice solution, but I'm counting on Apple to come up with a nice MobileMe.app that works better and more directly.
I was a bit annoyed about the closed iTunes system too. but on the other hand, all the apps that get in are reviewed and have at least a reasonable working. Some of them might get unstable, but if you look at the enormous amount of apps and the relative few cases of bad apps, I think Apple is doing a wonderful job. You just can't let every desinger/software engineer roam free in your ipad. It will be just like the HTC phone of my coworker, who has installed dozens of apps on it, only to become so instable and untrustworthy that he has formated the whole thing and now only has the factory delevered programms on it. So it is a bit annoying, but in the end I'm more happy with a good working closed system than the unstable but open HTC my co-worker has. YMMV, as they say.
But on the other hand, look at the bright side: I read that you've got an ibook? With the money you got back from the iPad, perhaps you could save some more and buy a superb macbook pro 13" and have a very nice 9hour (IRRC) battery life?! Then you don't have the iTunes Cyclops-big-brother-eye-closed-system as one poster named it and still make a considerable leap forwarde in speed, weight, display quality, and battery life when compared to the ibook.
