Will have to keep a 'normal' laptop current to print off the paper plates to remain legal
There is no legal requirement, anywhere in Europe or the USA
AFAIK, for carrying
printed maps or plates.
They would be a little pushed to introduce such a law because it would play into the hands of certain copyright holders, and that would likely be illegal under EU law.
Kindle would handle all your plates and is superb in sunlight
Well, yes, it is the best B&W display device in existence (especially the DX) but due to astonishing stupidity on the part of Amazon it doesn't support directories, so if you have a few thousand PDFs you cannot retrieve them.
The only way to get that functionality is to run some processing on the list of files which generates the tags on which the Kindle "runs". You still have to avoid having 2 or more PDFs of the same name, but this has been done by some commercial apps. It's a real bodge though.
And if you are going to store just a small number of plates, you may as well print them out... and then you don't have to worry about keeping the thing charged which usually means taking it to a hotel.
One can keep denying this but a windows tablet would offer most things that are needed. I was hoping that the Ipad would stimulate these but instead most/all of the new ones being developed are running Android, which in turn makes them as useful for aviation as a chocolate teapot. It makes them work as a pure display device, which is OK if that's all you want, but since none of them have a sunlight readable screen you may as well buy the Ipad which is at least quite light and thin and isn't sunlight readable either.
Like I say this game has some way to go, but there is no indication that consumer products will ever have decent sunlight readable LCDs. It's just not a priority, and is not likely to be all the time the prime application is multimedia.