Been toying with the idea of getting an iPod, but they don't seem to make them in white anymore, so what's the point? :-)
Seriously, though, my Sony network walkman is 1/8 the size of an iPod classic, 1/3 the size of a shuffle, stores plenty of tunes and has a much better sound (Sony's ATRAC is, to my ear, much higher quality than the equivalent bitrate AAC), and since it is silver and metal it is much shinier. And I have no interest in watching video on a 320x240 screen - been there done that a dozen years ago when it was bleeding edge.
One thing about iTunes is it's sloooowwww on a PC. On my screaming fast quad core CPU, 52x CD reader, it takes about 10 minutes to rip a CD to AAC. That's about 7 minutes too long. It took 51 minutes to burn 1.3GB onto a DVD even though I have a 16x writer and 16x blanks. That's about 46 minutes too long, if you count overhead. Anyone on a Mac have comparison numbers?
Other than the speed, iTunes is pretty decent. The colors are boring, but so are the screens for Sony Sonic Stage, which iTunes strongly resembles. Excellent "find" feature which drops non-matching items from view as you type in each character. Sorting is easy & intuitive. I have yet to discover how to tell it to plop ripped files directly into a folder other than the library, but it's a simple drag and drop once they are ripped.