Amazon’s quest to have a foothold on just about every major computer and gadget platform possible came a step closer to completion recently, as they finally released Kindle for Mac, which rounds out their support for the PC, iPhone, and Blackberry. It’s available for download right now on Amazon’s website.

Like the Kindle for PC application before it, Kindle for Mac is fairly light as far as features go. After you put in your account information, you can download any of the books you’ve purchased via Amazon, and it will sync all your notes and bookmarks made with your other devices. Other than that, you can basically scroll through pages with your mouse wheel, change the size of the text and… that’s it. I’m still a fan of the ability to see notes cleanly on a big monitor, as the applications for students are potentially tremendous, but the fact that you can’t make new notes is staggeringly backward.

The lack of features or flash in these applications has started to become somewhat embarrassing. Where are the social applications? Why isn’t the Amazon store built into the program? Why am I not getting recommendations based on the books in my library? Why isn’t navigation simpler? You’d think they’d be trying to at least ape Apple’s style releasing a program on their platform.

Fortunately for Amazon, they do have a chance to redeem themselves with Apple fanatics. We’ve just learned that Amazon is planning to release a Kindle for Tablet computers app, and the copy on their website makes explicit mention of iPad support. This confirms our speculation from last week that the iPad would sport at least three different bookstores, including the iBookstore, Barnes & Noble’s store, and now Amazon’s. With all three companies looking for preferential pricing from publishers, this is about to get interesting, and underscores the need for Amazon to spice up their software offerings if they want to compete head-to-head with a beauty queen like Apple.

With all this focus on pushing out support for the store on all these different platforms, don’t you kind of get the feeling that Amazon has left Kindle itself by the wayside? The iPad is going to be able to do a great variety of things on top of being able to display all the content that the Kindle can (albeit in a far less readable, backlit way). So how can they really expect people to keep buying books in their proprietary file format, when the trend is clearly going cross-platform? These are questions Amazon is going to have to answer, and fast, before the iPad hits stores on April 3.