Well said, Noah. The interesting part is that they don’t know what they don’t know. It makes an engineer friend crazy that Apple wins with what he thinks of as lesser value and no technology advantage.

“Experience” is exactly the right word — it’s the whole package, starting with the advertising. And the packaging, for that matter. I remember when I got my iPod, showing someone the clever, stylish packaging. How many products do you own that you remember how it was boxed?

With regard to tagging and wireless — those could be real winners. I can see teens, especially, sharing pointers to new music and videos, which makes this product viral. And since Apple’s entrenched models lack wireless, they could be caught short.

Short version: the iPod wins because of cool HW, fun & easy scroll wheel, good software, good synchronization experience, seamless music store integration, and tons of accessories. (I think he misses the also-relevant issue of a music store pricing model that doesn’t suck.)

He concludes that no attack on the iPod’s dominance will be credible if it only addresses one or two points in this ecosystem.

As far as I’m aware, most players seem to try compete on capacity, price, or battery life, and utterly miss the parts that users care about, which is to say the other 90% of the experience.