Interesting thread. Hadn't heard about the Zune whatever.
Of course I make no secret that I'm an Apple fan, but even if I weren't, I don't see much probability of another product being an iPod killer. For one thing, as many have noted, it's just too late to do much iPod killing. That horse is already out of the barn and has been running obviously very well for a long time already. Then as others mentioned, there's the design issue, which combines with the marketing.
So while Zune or something else out there or something else that comes along may work better or more freely or be more reliable in some ways, that doesn't mean it will kill the iPod. If that were all it took, then Macs might well have been PC killers in the late 80s and in the most famous example, Beta would have killed VHS before that. Instead in both cases, the format that took appropriate steps to spread to dominance in the marketplace continues to rule, apart from questions of superiority or inferiority (or in the case of VHS,
continued to until a wholly different superior medium came along in the form of DVD).
Now something like
that might be an iPod killer, someday. And I like my iPod (a 40GB one that's now 2.5 years old, what was top of the line before the Photo model, preceding the video and Nano models), but maybe I'm just lucky as I also have never had any problem with it. I think in all that time I've had to restart it maybe 3 times, and the battery's been fine, too.
Dunno much about PC-style DRM, as I only just recently and for the first time heard copmlaints from PC-using friends about having trouble transferring their music files ripped straight from CDs to other (newer) computers. Couldn't believe there was such a problem! Nothing like that in Mac-land. (Indeed I have never had the problem of ripping from newer, protected CDs on my Macs, either.) If you want to transfer music files ripped from CD and don't want to deal with iTunes' one-way system, you just copy them onto the iPod directly, as you would onto any external device. That won't help you with stuff you downloaded from the iTunes store, but then that doesn't have anything to do with your iPod or its design, that's just the restriction on the protected file you downloaded. If you don't like it, you can go with some other music service, I guess, and whatever their restrictions are.
Steve