A lot of people seem to confuse DRM and sound quality and the reasons for the iPod's success.

* Many people -- media especially -- believe that the iPod is linked to DRM music, forgetting that it fully supports non-DRM music. Really, it's no different from a Play For Sure device or the Zune or the devices that work with Rhapsody: works with all regular music and the particular flavor from Apple.

* People also conflate the iPod and iTunes, trying to attribute the weaknesses (or strengths) of one to the other. They are produced by separate teams at Apple (which talk to each other a lot, of course.) They are not the same product.

* The biggest causes of audio differences are (a) the quality of the headphones and (b) the bitrate of the track on the device. If you aren't using the same base file and the same headphones, sound "quality" differences likely mean nothing.

* The #1 reason for the success of the iPod is Design. The thing simply works, works well, works consistently, and looks good. Very few other devices approach it on any of those fronts, much less all. (iRiver Clix is nice.) It's like so much else from Apple: if you make people happy with the experience, they will recommend it to their friends, and your sales will increase; if people are unhappy or ambivalent about the device, they may continue to use it, but they won't proselytize, and your sales will remain small.

As corollaries: it doesn't matter how pretty it is if using it is hard. And it doesn't matter how many formats it supports and how many extra features it has, if it's ugly as sin.