UPDATE: Oh, and let's not forget the FM tuner, which is also a nano-only thing, and had to have been a last-minute decision once they realized they were decoupling the nano so firmly from the rest of the lineup (none of the shuffle's VoiceOver stuff on the higher-end models, if I understand correctly). They already had the software support, ever since the third-party tuners prompted them to create the radio remote add-on way back when; but now they've got a whole TiVo-esque pausing-and-tagging thing, presumably more as a means of protecting their own pride than anything else. I mean, they've survived without an FM tuner for eight years now, shrugging off criticism with a grin whenever any competitor showed up stamping its feet and demanding that customers pay attention to this indispensable-even-if-they-don't-realize-it feature. (I still fondly remember Microsoft's "Let a professional choose your next playlist!" exhortation.) For them to be putting in a tuner now would seem like an admission of wrongness if it was all they'd done. So they had to go all-out and make it something way more than "just a tuner", just so they could say, "Well, see, we had to do it right if we were going to do it at all."

You don't suppose maybe Apple's been stung by the Zune's out-of-the-blue embrace of HD Radio, do you?

UPDATE: LOL, LOL I say:
Welcome to iTunes 9! Here's a picture so you'll be sure to recognize it!

UPDATE: Nice new look to the iTunes Store, looking like a cross between the iPhone's iTunes interface and Google Earth; but it seems they might need to work on their CSS templates a little more:

UPDATE: My first impression of the radio tagging feature in the new FM Tuner was that it would leverage the TiVo functionality to record a chunk of the song and then compare it against known waveforms the way the awesome and uncanny Shazam does. Since it requires "radio stations that support iTunes Tagging", which I presume to mean RDS, I guess that's not the case, even though it requires you to sync back to iTunes in order to do anything with your tags. But if you have RDS, why is tagging useful?

UPDATE: Oh yes, and count me among the Classic Fanboys.

Gotta have something for the car, after all.

UPDATE: I mentioned to Chris today that "it'd be hilarious if an iPod turned out to be a better Flip than the Flip, just like the iPhone turned out to be a better Palm than the Palm and a better game system than the PSP".

Funnily enough, it looks like that's how they're marketing the things now.

Do-everything devices used to be a crappy compromise, and single-purpose devices—"do one thing and do it well"—were the winners. Think the original iPod versus, say, the original Palms with music-playing applications. But I guess the secret lies not in doing a lot of things even if you have to do them crappily, but in doing a lot of things and doing them all better than a collection of single-purpose devices would. So in other words, not a secret at all; just beating the crap out of everybody's expectations.

Guess you can't go wrong with that...