I encounter freezes mostly when I enable Bluetooth/wifi. Haven't tried on a multi-core kobo but I imagine the UI thread can keep running there.

When reading, agree on it being more than sufficient.

My recommendation is partially because the price can be identical when they have a sale. That was the case when I got a BW--it was the same price as the color.

I should also mention I run quite a few things on my kobo: boringtun to connect to my home network, a fetcher to sync my books and feeds, Plato and its article fetcher whenever I update my Wallabag articles. I'm beyond pleased with my reader experience. The extra processing power would just be icing on the cake.