I think you're really on to something there...
The question is how long will it be before any average Joe will be able to write his masterpiece and get it onto a reader like the Kindle or the iPad in the future? With the iPad and future devices that will follow, it probably won't be that long... As you point out, the situation today is that the Publishers are still the "gatekeepers" who get to decide what is worthy to be consumed by the masses. In the world where eBooks are king, the Publisher, at least in his current form, is not going to be very important.
We may be rapidly approaching a world where authors are being discovered based on short-stories that ended up on some "YouTube" equivalent for writers, leading to floods and floods of submissions. The up side is that everyone gets motivated to give it a go, the down side is that, like on YouTube, there will be so many really bad submissions that it will be relatively hard to find the good ones (come to think of it, the App Store is kinda like that too

)
One element that is beginning to emerge as a new "gate" of control, however, is the distributors themselves (i.e. Amazon, Apple, etc.) and it will be interesting to see how they use their new position... Will they refuse to sell certain books or content? Will they take on the role of editor, etc.?
I wonder how long it will take before
any content can be loaded on these Ebook Readers, effectively undoing the need for official distribution channels like "iBooks". With an app-oriented OS and rumors of a workable file-system coming with the iPad, there may be a market opening up for a host of new "distributors", both legal and not, to get eBook content onto digital readers.
This would, of course, be very bad for Apple's new eBook based revenue stream... especially since, by definition, it's going to be a lot harder to prevent copyright infringement on text (at least compared to video/audio).
Could we be approaching an era where people actually start reading again? Even young people?