Your filters are malfunctioning. There is no 'cult'. Apple has gone mainstream and people like you are working off a page from 1993. Your loss.
"This is worse than basketball shoes, monster truck/NASCAR favoritism, or even professional wrestling fanaticism."
yeah, I'll agree with that. I'm a little surprised over the hysteria generated over a hard drive in a plastic shell. I don't really care what players people buy for themselves.
They only thing that rankles me is the idea that Apple is making an effort (though fortunatly not successful) to corner the market on music sales on the internet through their i-tunes store by designing the i-pod firmware to block out the other major online distributors like napster, wal-mart, rhapsody and buy.com. It's vertical integration at it's worst. Rhapsody in particular seems to have the most open software. Creative, Rio and I-River players are the most flexible.