I'm sorry, but this seems to me to be a big old troll thread.
Being older than the age of the OP, I find the display to be wonderful and clear and crisp, and my "more ancient" eyes have no problem viewing what's on the screen. In fact I've posted in other threads on here that I'm so impressed that I can view clearly the PDFs for the university course I'm on.
I'm not sure at all what all the people on this thread about talking about, seriously. It's like I bought a completely different device from them, which is why I suggested it's a thread filled with troll comments, please forgive if that's not the case, but if you're all being truthful, we are having entirely different experiences with this device, and I wonder why that is.
It helps to agree to talk about the same things. For example, go to cnn.com and view that web site and an article or two in portrait mode. If you look at a word like "still", you will notice that the "i" is rather indistinct, and you will find that the widths of the "l" characters vary. (This latter may be a glitch in Safari; I was rather shocked by it, and I'll be interested to hear from the guy who said he was going to look at other browsers.) Look at several such words on the page, as not all may be affected in exactly the same way, but overall, the text just doesn't look great. If you rotate to landscape mode, you implicitly zoom the page a bit, which helps; the more you zoom, the clearer it gets. To be fair, as I noted in an earlier post in this thread, the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7 are also fairly awful at rendering web pages at their native size, and the solution is the same; rotate to landscape and/or zoom, which you probably need to do anyway in order to touch those tiny links with any accuracy.
While the 7" tablets sport higher resolution at 216 PPI vs the Mini's 163 PPI, they are also smaller, and because web pages are scaled horizontally to fit, they're being asked to display physically smaller text than the iPad Mini, and their 216 PPI resolution just isn't enough to display text clearly at those small font sizes. This reduces their effective resolution for this scenario, and in this scenario, their "normalized" resolution is probably around 180-190 PPI, not that much greater than the Mini's 163 PPI. The bottom line is you need to zoom them just as much as you need to zoom the Mini, actually more, as their screens are only 7" vs the Mini's 7.9".
Example: If I did my calculations right, a 7" 16:10 tablet's screen is 3.7" wide. The 7.85" 4:3 iPad Mini is 4.7" wide. Assuming they're displaying the same web page in the same way, i.e. scaled horizontally to fit, the characters on the 7" tablets are 3.7/4.7 or 79% the size of the Mini's. Just to keep the arithmetic simple, assume a character is 1" wide on the Mini, which then has 163 pixels in which to render it. That same character would be .79" wide on the Kindle/Nexus, and .79"*216 PPI = 170 pixels. So the effective resolution in this scenario is even worse than I estimated! It's basically the same as the Mini's, and the fidelity of the font rendering isn't any better in this scenario; the text is just smaller.
At larger font sizes, like the default in iBooks, the Mini does a perfectly fine job IMO. I think the Mini actually wins overall due to its larger size and squarer aspect ratio.
All these tablets require one to go to landscape or zoom to display good-looking text on full-size web pages, and people would do well to keep all these things in mind, because it's not quite so simple as 216 > 163.
