iTunes doesn't work with any other peice of hardware unless it's accedental (think a palm phone can synch with it for some odd reason), but you can't use Napster or any other service like iTunes with your iPod.  They force your only legal downloads to come from iTunes.  I don't have a problems with that, but for people who have hundreds of dollars invested in iTunes that's a problem if they want to switch to a Zune or Creative

I don't think that would be anti-competitive....

It would just be giving something away... for free.

If nintendo gave away free N64's bundled with the gameboy I don't believe anyone would of said anything outside of some snide PR.

It's not accidental, of course... interfacing with iTunes is a feature of pieces of hardware such as the Palm Pre.

As to someone forcing your only legal downloads to come from iTunes, let me say: "uh?"

Build your MP3/AAC library any way you want and a plethora of software tools will allow you to organize it in playlists and sync with your iPod.

Unless you buy something like a DRM-locked WMA file that your iPod won't play, but then you're the culprit. When you accept to pay money for a DRM-encumbered content, you're accepting that you will be restricted in the way you manage and playback that content. But it's not as if there's no choice: I don't think there's music out there that is exclusive to a given DRM format.

iTunes does sell DRM-free versions of all its content for what I know, and you can manage and play that music however and wherever you want.

I think it's anti-competitive to purposefully lose money in order to drive competitors away. Otherwise you're just asking for big companies to easily own a lot of markets (then becoming even bigger and more capable of crushing others).

Isn't that more or less what videogame companys do all the time?

I mean they loss lead like crazy... except for Nintendo. 

@Kasz216: Yeah but they are not dominating the market so people just let them happily lose money.

What about the PS2?  That loss lead... and the PS2 ended up dominating the market...

But they got profitable pretty quickly, and on their own didn't really do enough to eliminate the competition.

I don't know to what extent they'd need to loss lead to create problems for themselves... I'm guessing it depends on a lot of factors, including the importance of the industry, how much the competitors complain and the past behavior of the company.

You use excuses and work arounds... and no it's not all DRM free if it was I could plug my GF iPod into my 360 and play back her music... I can't.  I can play back the music she burned from her own stash, but downloaded music is a no go.  Apple has a choke hold on the market that's almost painful to watch and the whole reason is that got their foot in to the door first and now if you have tons of iTunes purchases you're probably going to be stuck and even if all music was non-DRM most people still don't understand and most devices don't play back AAC(is that correct... been out of the loop for a little while).  I think someone from Gizmondo said it best on a tech interview I watched about ZuneHD... "What most people will ask when they see it is 'can I use iTunes with this?' the answer is no and so they'll never get it"

I'm not trying to find excuses nor workarounds, I'm trying to assess the situation as fairly as i can for my limited experience, even though I despise some of Apple's policy as much as MS's when it comes to so-called "integration".

As for the DRM and iTunes: check again, you can buy 100% of the music in both DRM-encumbered or DRM-free formats. I guess your GF downloaded the DRM-encumbered one, that I get is cheaper and comes in a lower quality encoding, but obviously with no guarantee of use save in Apple-approved ways. iTunes will even convert the DRM-free tunes to MP3 if you want, so that you can play them anywhere, including your Zune.

As for plugging your GF's iPod to your 360, straight from support.microsoft.com: "To play unprotected advanced audio coding (AAC) music from an Apple iPod, use your Xbox LIVE Silver or Gold Membership to download a free update from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace." The PS3 will see the iPod as a USB device and play AAC files, as well.

Windows comes preinstalled and set up into 99% of the computers sold to final users, with most of the times no option to have a preinstalled and set up alternative OS. Thus the choice offered to the final user is either accept the offer and expertise from the seller, or jump on their own into the depths of an OS install, a daunting task for your average user. That's not a fair competition from the start go.

On the other hand people have to download and install iTunes on their computer, and in the same way they can choose to download and install different programs to manage their library and/or connect to a music selling service. I can't see how iTunes is at a fault here.