I am madly in love with my ipod. It's 20 GB, and I've had no problems with it. Along with some cheapass mp3 sites, I've amassed quite a collection of great songs. There are some other features on ipod too (simple games, calendar, address book, etc.), but I haven't used them, so I can't say whether they're that great. I heard the games run the battery down quicker though. The battery is my only complaint. It lasts 8 hours, if you just let it play and don't mess with the controls. However, when I organize my music between my computer and my ipod, it only takes a couple of hours to run down the battery, because the hard drive spins a lot more. Using the backlighting also will kill your battery faster. But if you buy a cigarette lighter adaptor, you won't have to worry about it dying while your driving. You can also buy an additional power source that runs off AA batteries. Either one of these will run you about $50 a piece. Actually, that's my 2nd complaint: if you want any accessories, you'll pay out the nose for it. But ipod is still worth it, just be sure to put it in your charger before you go to bed at night.
I bought mine off of apple's official site. Shipping was free, and they'll engrave it for free (I put my name on mine). You can get the educational discount on the site too, which paid for my tax. My ipod ended up costing me about $396 total.
Here's a link about a lawsuit with apple over battery life:
http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/010499.php
There are also rumblings that ipod mini isn't as good as the full size ipods. They supposedly have a lot of static. I think there is a lawsuit with this too. Here's a link about it:
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/04/04/11/1835219.shtml?tid=137&tid=141&tid=176&tid=188