My biggest issue with this design, unlike say, the leather bound Address Book, is that it's tied to a technology that the generation Apple would like to appeal to have never used. It's akin to changing the App Store to having hand written floppy disks. All the teenagers that Apple would love to attract have no attachment, or perhaps not even an idea, about the object Podcasts is designed about.

I agree that it probably is helpful to less technical people, but only when those items they call back to are ones the user is familiar with. Choosing a reel-to-reel is a terrible decision. 11 year olds today will have never known a world without an iPod. The iPod is the music player. At least Apple didn't try an iPod within an iPod, I suppose.