Why you would be surprised baffles me. There are only a few e-ink tablets with color and they're all small and expensive. Setting that aside, they're not focusing (that much) on e-book comic reading, their focus is note taking, drawing and pdf reading. I use mine to do all three things and it works excellent, couldn't be happier. The remarkable is expensive no doubt but it's a much better device at what it does than an ipad or any other tablet for that matter if you ask me.
I can't comment on the other tablets mentioned her as I haven't used anything else but ipad previously and now the remarkable 1. gen.
I can speak for the cross platform open source project I work on; we don't pay the license fee. That means regularly bumping into new users that need help with opening the mac application, so we've written a "How to" guide as a workaround . It's an annoyance we'll live with, probably until we hit v1.0 and then i'll probably take it upon me to pay that fee.
Might be worth taking a look again