Except that iTunes (launched Jan '01) came out 10 months before the iPod (Oct '01) and more than two years before the iTunes Music Store (April '03).
You're just stating release dates. Just because they opened the stores 2 years after the iPod came along, doesn't mean that they didn't want to leverage the iPod for the store's benefit and vice versa. Secondly when the iPod came out the 1st 2 generations were pretty unpopular, the hype took off with the 3rd Gen iPod in the US and 4G/5G iPod in other places like SA.
The iPod does have a particularly nasty impediment of having to use the iTunes program which is neither too intuitive for some us of, nor can iTunes provide both way traffic of media onto and off the iPod. 3rd party apps like
Xplay came out to fill the niche and allowed for drag and drop (both ways) and on the go playlist creation - you can use your iPod like a USB stick drive
and it plays the songs you drag/drop and you can retrieve them later (for
backup purposes) or to put them on a second or 3rd PC. There is at least one freeware app like that for Mac's too.
I bought a copy of Xplay shortly after I got my 3G iPod in 2003. I just couldn't get used to iTunes and later WinAMP iPod plugins were not too friendly either. At present I don't have a problem with either my Creative Zen Vision 30GB - where I can drag and drop files with aid of a Creative application and my Cowon A3 60GB which is entirely Mac OSX and Windoze based, ie it's seen natively as an external USB 2.0 harddrive and copying files
both ways on the PC and MAC is incredibly simple, in fact I often download
Mac OSX and Final Cut Studio (and other) updates (they can be huge as many ppl here know) and use my Cowon A3 player to move the files PC to
Mac (My Mac only has dial-up access via ext USB Apple modem).
My suggestion is to buy Xplay, it's really a very good application. Get the free trial version to check it out but Xplay was the only way I could use my iPod
without doing things un-intuitively. Now I'm sure other ppl love iTunes and I don't have a problem with that, just for those who don't - Xplay is a great alternative and provides something that Apple did not include - probably to curb the copying of media files.