Jobs has said he would love to move away from DRM. Unfortunately the contracts they have with most of the labels will not let them do so. But there is a growing number of non-DRMed music on iTunes. Not to mention that if you hate it that much you can always burn the music and reload and you have unencrypted mp3s. Something Steve Jobs has mentioned several times in interviews.
You're better off ripping your own from the start if that's what you intend. Converting from lossy compression to WAV, then to another lossy compression is bound to leave auditory artifacts.