So I did it, I broke down and purchased an ipod. I have fought with myself for many months on whether or not I'd get an apple brand music player, or even if I'd get one at all. Well, I was at Costco a couple nights ago and they had ipods on sale for about half of their normal price. My wife and I had been given a late wedding gift in the form of a Costco gift card. We were looking at winter jackets, food supplies, printers, and a few other mundane items when we came across the ipod display. Two days previous to this we had purchased a Nintendo DS for my wife (ok, yeah, I play it too) and so she looked at me and said "Get it".

I chose the original ipod. Here's my reasoning:

I don't trust flash memory for long-term use (which eliminated getting smaller mp3/ipod players such as the Shuffle and Nano),
every person that I've known who has gotten an mp3 player has had problems with them...except for the ipod owners,
The ipods at Costco were $80 cheaper then the cheapest non-apple alternative,
There were two choices, the original 20gb and the Mini 6gb. Size vs capacity: I wanted to be able to hold my entire collection which is currently around 10gb,
About 95% of my usage will be non-workout related (primarily used at work), so I'm not worried as much about weight or bulk for uses such as running.