I've been waiting for the 'touch' iPod, and must say I am a little dissapointed. Why didn't they just make the thing thicker and drop a proper HD in there. I love being able to haul 60gb of stuff around, and never got the 'video' iPod since it had such a small screen.
I agree wholeheartedly. It's obviously coming, but we'll probably have to wait until next generation.
My, completely not-based-on-evidence-at-all, guess is that the OS underneath the iPod Touch/iPhone won't run anywhere near as smoothly when loading from a hard drive, and is too big to fit into the cheap small amount of onboard RAM they build into the "classic" iPods. Therefore, there only choice for Apple to provide a "touchy" hard drive based iPod would have been to include both flash and hard drive storage (a hybrid solution). I'd guess, since the true hybrid hard drives are still coming into the market (and still command early adopter sized prices) that this was not a possibility from a cost benefit perspective.
That's why we now have the iPod classic.
I bet next gen will eliminate the classic (unless they sell super-well) and have a flash-based iPod touch, and a hybrid (small amount of flash + big hard drive) high-end iPod touch, in addition to the fatty nano and shuffle lines.