In the end, you have to really decide for yourself, what particular gadget is best suited for you. There are always, sometimes painful, compromises that have to be made between cost, quality and features. It, looking at all my options and making the decision, is overwhelming enough that I sometimes fantasize about living in the 1940s when my options consisted almost entirely of pencils, pens, books, magazines and newspapers, the radio, a record player and a landline. Simpler days, my friend. The Kindle Fire, as @dabbler points out, certainly seems to pack a lot into a $199 device, but it is not an iPad, but it isn’t anywhere near as pricey as an iPad either.
It appears, from The New York Times article that @janbb links to, that the one biggest downside seems to be that it looks like owning the Kindle Fire will pretty much make you Amazon’s bitch, so to speak. :-)
“Amazon can afford to charge less because it hopes to make up the difference by selling books, movies and popular television shows”
and
“With the Fire, every dollar Amazon loses on the device could be more than made up for by the data gained. The Silk browser, by virtue of being situated in the cloud, will record every Web page that users visit. That has implications for privacy and commerce.”
The machine will tie you very heavily to Amazon, Amazon’s services and Amazon’s content and Amazon’s data mining.