it ends up that humans don't like the idea of a book as a formless blob of text. who knew? well, i did, for one...
Sorry, but apparently you didn't read the actual press release. The Kindle will only calculate the "real page number" when you specifically push the "Menu" button and ask it to be calculated, and the page numbers never affect the actual display of text which continues to be a "formless blob" so the page numbers continue to NOT be embedded in the displayed text nor interfere with the Kindle users seamless experience of reading the text without the interference of artificial page boundaries -- which is how it should be. This Kindle Sop seems like a reasonable accommodation to say college students who need to be able to reference the book they are reading to an equivalent page# and ISBN of a paper book in order to keep their old-world-technology college professors happy.