Where is the downside to that? Apple software is light years better than PC. It's when they have to port it to run on a Windows platform does it lose its magic.
I don't want an IPhone because i would have to use ITunes and I don't want to. Plus I have a MDA and I can listen to music on it without ITunes. Yes, its a pretty kickass phone but it pisses me off that you have to use all apple software.
I don't like iTunes either. It wants to load things on startup that aren't strictly necessary. That is, in and of itself, sufficient reason to have nothing to do with it in a luxury market, in my opinion. But you don't need iTunes for an iPod, so I doubt you'd need it for this either ... assuming the music you own doesn't have some other type of DRM in it. And I most certainly feel the draw of a subscription-based music service, which iTMS doesn't offer, since I stop listening to the vast majority of tracks after a certain time.
Already owning a player is also a valid reason not to want one, because then you're paying to have something different, instead of something at all.
Other stuff:
-Typing on a touchscreen sucks. Positive tactile feedback FTW
-4/8GB of memory? Weaksauce. I know a hard drive would decrease battery life but guess what? Completely not my problem. leads to
-This thing is a really obvious lead-in to the flash/HDD solutions being made soon by different companies. This amplifies the already-existing effects of
-Apple's tendency to release a first-gen of something that's barely sufficient, or at least anemic when contrasted with later versions, like a beta-test, to see where they need to improve things the most. So I'd wait until at least 2nd gen, which I'd call for Christmas season 2007.
-Cingular is kind of meh.
-A lot of the features require you to use EDGE, which is slow (2.75g instead of 3g) and expensive.
-Very expensive ... $500/600 +2 year contract ... in general I just hate contracts.
I would generally say it's not worth how much they want to charge, but then again I've said that about virtually every MP3-player to hit the market to date, so.
