While staying at a friend's place, I had the opportunity to get my hands on the new Kindle (you can view some Kindle photos on my Flickr account). Truth be told I wasn't expecting it to be so small and light, although I had used (not owned) ebook readers before (Kindle 1st generation and a Turbo-X one).
iBooks is, imo, the best pdf reader for iPad at the moment. It is fast, well implemented and you can read ePub & PDF files without switching apps.
Sure there are lots of good distraction-free text editors out there (Writeroom, OmmWriter) but it seems that there's already a pretty simple app in your basic MacOSX installation that can fill your needs: TextEdit.
