Because the ipod is better and not much more money than the imitatiors. The human factors of ipod and itunes is vastly superior. And nobody says you have to buy music from the itunes store. Rip CD to MP3 or AAC. itunes will do the ripping.
You can also download some small apps that can strip the ID tags from Itunes .m4p files and convert them to mp3's or .aif's, etc.