Superior in what aspect? Design? No way. Ergonomics? Don't flatter yourself. Sound quality? Well, I do not feel the least bit cheated when I listen to my CDs ripped at AAC192 on a Headroom Total Airhead and Sennheiser HD-580s, though obviously most of my iPod listening is done on lesser headphones (Koss KSC-35s or KSC-75) driven only using the internal amp. (Admittedly the iPod is not as clean as using iTunes on my Powerbook to wirelessly feed Apple Lossless encoded music bit-perfectly over my Airport Express, but there are D/A-A/D conversion issues - Panny digital-amp receiver - and of course the difference between lossless and lossy encoding there. So if someone else has an iPod sized player that will also by itself stream losslessly encoded music bit-perfect digitally I'll concede the sound quality issue as long as you concede that for most of the uses of a portable player that ability is irrelevant.)
Clearly you are in denial
and from the looks of it, your lineup of older players are crap too which probably means you haven't tried the newer mp3 players that have came out. I admit iPod is a pretty good mp3 player for people who aren't very good at using computers, but if you basically know how to drag and drop a file to a usb thumbdrive, you can do way better.
The best thing the iPod actually has is its line out since its headphone out is just plain out bad, but like you said, that that would require an amp and kill the whole reason for portability right?
I would seriously look at other mp3 players before saying the iPod is superior to others. The Rio Karma and the iAudio X5 are ipod-killers, not to mention the other offerings by iRiver or Creative's Zen series.
[Edit] Don't tell me its easier to navigate too, since when was having to pull out the mp3 player out of your pocket to change a song every time easier? [/Edit]
