The friendly folks at Jinke in China have answered my questions regarding their plans:

Thank you for your concern about our products. Jinke Company is the professional enterprise focus on design and manufacture eBook device. We have released various eBook devices; so far the sales quantity has reached over 150K. At present, we are going to launch the new devices V8 and V2, which adopting E Ink display technology. And V2 is mainly towards Europe and America markets, V2 adopts Linux OS supporting various viewers, including PDF Viewer, HTML Viewer, TXT Viewer, Wolf Viewer etc. Even can use the SDK provided by us to develop the Viewer software for the third party. And we also make the products according to the client’s requirements and OEM as well.
About our products, the end of 2005 will launch V8, and V2 will be launched in May of 2006. We will have distributors or agents in Europe and America, when the products are released. The English edition of the eBook device will be released for Europe and America customers. The expected retail price of V8 will be 299 US$, and V2 349US$.

Approximatelly acceptable pricepoint, no word of DRM-crap, free SDK, native PDF-viewer! I have trouble waiting so long :-)