Well, not even 24 hours after my post, my dad sent me an email to tell me he bought a Kindle. I guess it makes sense for him as A) he has more money than he knows what to do with, B) he's always wanted to read books on a PDA but the screens were never big/sharp enough for him, and C) he trusts Amazon to sell books to him.
I think C is going to be the biggest thing for getting the Kindle adapted. I don't want to buy *anything* from Sony after their CD rootkit DRM fiasco, and really, when you think about, just about everyone in America knows that Amazon sells books and does it well. Although personally I think his money is more of an investment in the IDEA of buying books in a digital format than an investment in a good piece of hardware, it's nice that there are early adopters out there to make sure the rest of us will have a bandwagon to jump onto in the future.