I'm not an Apple fanboy by any means, but nobody else has produced a device that makes it so easy to find, buy, and listen to music on the go.
Amazon's Cloud Player is a good start, since it eliminates having to load the music on to the device, but the player still needs some polish.
Whatever convenience buying music directly through my iPhone would offer is more than canceled out by this inconvenience. I'll admit that I'm not the kind of music consumer that buys single mp3s though — full album or nothing for me — so I'm biased in that way.
Anyway, thanks for the responses. I was embarrassingly unaware of the changes. Though maybe the moral of the story is that DRM is a good way to lose a customer who won't come back under any circumstances if there's an equal service available without it.
Here is how you can deauthorize all computers associated with your iTunes account (the third list of instructions): http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1420
It's a bit hidden but it's easy to do.
It still does in the video store though.
Completely agree with this, but I would two more factors -- a relevant selection from the outset, and the reliability and legitimacy of iTMS.
If there was a way to use my iPad and iPhone without ever needed to connect to a desktop computer I'd feel like I won a million bucks.
Over the air updates are nice I guess, but how would I backup and restore 30Gb of data to my phone over the air?
Not exactly an iTunes competetor. Maybe they're purposefully avoiding competeing directly with iTunes by offering a completely different type of expirence.