Though Bloomberg News actually beat Jeff Bezos to the punch, it’s now official: Amazon has launched their much-anticpated tablet, known as the Kindle Fire. It debuted today at a 7″ size and a $200 price point.

The unit is based on the same physical design as the BlackBerry PlayBook, but lacks a mic, camera and 3G. It’s multi-touch capabilities are also limited to two points of contact unlike Apple’s iPad which can recognize up to 10. The Kindle Fire will also include 30 days of Amazon Prime, a program that offers members free streaming music and video (in the U.S.) along with benefits such as reduced shipping rates on Amazon orders.

Among the Kindle Fire’s unique features are rapid web-page loading thanks to a technology that Amazon calls “Amazon Silk”. It’s their way of leveraging their considerable cloud-based infrastructure to handle some or all of the rendering processes required by a browser to display a web page. Depending on your settings, Silk can take over the web surfing experience or you can manage it all locally on your tablet.

In a similar vein, Amazon is taking their WhisperSync technology to its obvious next level: the Kindle Fire will let you bookmark where you are in any movie or TV show so that you can resume playback from that point, regardless of the device you’re using.

In addition to the Kindle Fire, Amazon is also introducing a new Kindle e-reader, known as the Kindle Touch. It uses the same infrared system as the Kobo Touch but incorporates an ambidextrous system for easy page turns. There’s also a cool feature called “X-Ray” which downloads additional material from Wikipedia along with your book so that on each page, you can pull up relevant information that helps you get more out of your read. The example shown was the Wikipedia entry on the Treaty of Versailles as it relates to the book Remains of the Day. The Kindle Touch is only $99, while a global 3G version will cost $149 (all prices in $USD).

Also new to the Kindle stable is a $109 version that once again features physical buttons (though no keyboard) and is smaller and lighter than the current 3rd generation Kindle. The new Kindles will all have “Special Offers” versions at lower prices. These feature local ads instead of the literary screen savers, which presumably help Amazon to get this new lower price point. This version of the Kindle is now known as simply “Kindle”, while the 3rd generation – the one with the physical keyboard – has been renamed the Kindle Keyboard. It also gets a new price point: $99 for the Wi-Fi only model.

Given the abundance of new models and prices, here’s a simplified cheat-sheet (all prices in $USD) – and yes, sadly no international availability for either the Fire or the Touch models as of today.

Kindle Fire
$199, Pre-order now, ships November 15th
U.S. orders only

Kindle
$79 (with Special Offers)
$109 (without Special Offers)
Available now

Kindle Touch
$99 (with Special Offers)
$139 (without Special Offers)
Pre-order now, ships November 21st
U.S. orders only

Kindle Touch 3G
$149 (with Special Offers)
$189 (without Special Offers)
Pre-order now, ships November 21st
U.S. orders only