Yes, the e-ink is the same. While the "flash" may seem distracting at first, you really do get used to it quickly.

As for the storage card being "sorely missing," on Kindle, I would disagree, unless you intend to use it heavily for audio books or music. I prefer my iPod for those, and thus, while I have more than 300 full-length books on Kindle and a lot of personal documents as well, I still have over 1.1 gigs of available space. With the ability to redownload anything you've bought from Amazon whenever you like, you can also delete books on the device to free up space if you need to, or just back them up on your own flash or hard drive. So I don't really see how 16 gigs would ever be necessary for me.