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.
I haven't experienced such issues and I've had mine for years. On the first remarkable model you either use the physical buttons to turn page or use the somewhat recent swiping feature. Touching the surface while reading doesn't do anything, you have to explicitly swipe left or right to turn a page. Moving your finger or hand doesn't turn a page either, so I'd say you're pretty safe in that regard.
The reading experience on the remarkable is however not as feature rich as eink tablets that label themselves as 'ebook readers' but otherwise I think it's fine. I primarily use mine to draw and write notes, which it does very well but I also read.
Might be worth taking a look again