The New York Times published an article about bad reviews of the Fire, and the author reported soon afterwards that he had heard from numerous readers who were very pleased with it. I purchased it the day it was announced and am quite satisfied with it. Its main use for me will be as an update to the my original, aging Kindle e-reader. But I use it for general purpose web browsing and for watching movies. I have also been able to read the Boneyard (was not aware until now of Tapatalk, which I have purchased), the Summitt, the New York Times, and ESPN quite effectively through the web browser.
I think you will find that it is easy to read the Boneyard on the Fire, but you may not want to post from there, because of the limitations of the virtual keyboard (common to any tablet device). You will also be able to watch games on Hoopstreams with no real difficulty. I have even had reasonable success with ESPN3, although that can be frustrating.
I do not own an iPad because of the cost, but I did just purchase an iPhone 4S and will need to figure out whether and how I can do these things on that device.