I'd still certainly prefer that MC handle as many apple devices directly as they can. However, Apple doesn't make this easy. Never has and probably never will. And, the truth is that syncing an iPhone (or iPod Touch) with iTunes does a lot more than just sync music, images, podcasts, and video onto the phone. It installs new apps on the device (and backs up existing apps which you installed "over the air"), it syncs contacts (mine sync to my google contacts), and handles calendar syncing.
Unless MC intends to provide ALL of these services, wouldn't a good
alternative option be for MC to actually just use iTunes as though it were an external handheld. This would solve all of our problems with brand new apple devices, and allow us to fully utilize the features of our devices. And, while I don't think it'd make them real happy, you wouldn't really be even "hacking" anything.
iTunes has a published API! You can do all kinds of automating tricks with iTunes. That's how iTLU works, after all. I'm sure MC could do an awesome job, and give us full support for our devices and automated "handheld-like" syncing directly into iTunes.
Treat it for all intents and purposes as though it IS the handheld. Open it, "sync over to it" (meaning add the specified files to its database and remove the ones that should be removed, converting, copying, and conversion-caching as needed/desired), set the sync options, launch the sync, close iTunes when finished. Wham-bam-done. Slow and wasteful of disk space, but it'd work. And it'd work with new handhelds immediately (as long as they didn't muck with the API, but even if they did, they'd publish how to fix it).
Like I said. I'd still want native iPod support whenever possible, including for the iPhone. But it'd be awful nice for me to have the option to still get the benefit of those other features. And it'd be awful nice for JRiver to be able to effectively guarantee that it'll work with your trendy new gadget if it works with iTunes, at least as a backup. I realize that it is a bit of a bitter pill to effectively require that the user has the competitor's application installed on their machine. That's why I'm only suggesting this be treated as a backup plan. A supported one, but a backup plan. However, you can also look at it as a migration path for new users (many of whom are going to have iTunes already installed). And, frankly, the user doesn't care. The user wants results and wants his or her fancy doohickey to work.
And so do I.