ipod as an external drive between PCs and Macs

I'm on the verge of making use of the cram and jam special to get a new powerbook and ipod. The main thing holding me back is just how harmonious the environment will be between my 2 new friends and my PCs are home and school. I want to have my music on my powerbook, sync the music from there to my ipod. That doesn't seem to be a problem. The area in which I'm afraid a quandary will occur lies within my need to share files from my powerbook to my windows PCs at home and at school. Is this possible? I've heard no, the mac will format the ipod one way and the pc will format it another, but then again I've heard others say that the ipod could be formatted in fat32 and it could be read by the different OSs. I want to be able to work on some photoshopping on my powerbook, save a jpeg of the results to my ipod, take it to the XP machine at school, and show my instructors my work. Any help on the matter will be very appreciated.