Actually, I was more taken by the combination of the clickwheel, good firmware and nice hardware design which together make an ipod an amazingly nice device to use - unlike most of their competitors who fell down on some or all of those and ended up with something that could physically hold a thousand songs but couldn't actually deal with them all.

Although, I suppose it might be that itunes forms another part of that; I've owned an ipod but never installed itunes. For a lot of people it probably is a big deal though, especially if the only alternative they'd seen was whatever awful thing Sony was packaging at the time.

I'm still not sure that any of the competition have really copied that. At least I haven't seen a replacement yet that really felt equally well done. My guess would be that too many companies think their "innovation" is going to be "it's cheaper" and compromise quality in order to get there.