I'd like to learn a bit about uniform spaces, why are they useful, how do they arise, what do they generalize, etc., without getting away from the context of general topology. I have to prepare an 1h30min talk on the subject, for an audience formed in standard general topology (i.e. Munkres), not so much in abstract algebra (so I'd like not to use topological groups).


The references I have are Kelley or Willard texts on Topology, Isbell's "Uniform Spaces" and James's "Topological and Uniform Spaces".


I discarded the last one because of its heavy use of filters from the beginning. I don't know about any other good references. What I'd like to see is the subject treated as Munkres does in his book: he gives good motivations, pictures, and is gentle to the reader.



A good place to read about uniform spaces
I would motivate them as follows: if topological spaces were invented to give a general meaning to "continuous function", then uniform spaces were invented to give a general meaning to "uniformly continuous function". It is clear what "uniformly continuous" should mean for metric spaces and topological groups, but how should the general notion be formalized? 


Once this is formalized, one can define the notion of Cauchy net in a uniform space (which is something you cannot do for general topological spaces). This leads to the notion of completeness of course (every Cauchy net converges to *at least* one point), although the theory is much cleaner for complete *Hausdorff* uniform spaces, where you have convergence to *at most* one point as well. 


To illustrate this: the Cauchy completion of a uniform space $X$ can be defined in the usual way via equivalence classes of Cauchy nets. It is a complete Hausdorff uniform space $\bar{X}$ together with a map $i: X \to \bar{X}$ which satisfies a universal property: given a complete Hausdorff uniform space $Y$ and a *uniformly* continuous function $f: X \to Y$, there is a unique uniformly continuous map $\bar{f}: \bar{X} \to Y$ such that $\bar{f} \circ i = f$. (If you omit "Hausdorff" or "uniformly", you lose the universal property, which is arguably the point of the completion.) 


The nLab has an article on uniform spaces with some material not included in the Wikipedia article. 


