That thing looks like someone took an old black Sony Walkman, shrunk it a bit, and stuck in a photo-negatived iPod display. The menu navigation and the scrolling feature look pretty much the same, the buttons are in nearly the same position as the first two iPod versions, and the font looks familiar too. It does function as a hard drive, as well, even though it uses USB 2.0. Only the scroll wheel is missing, and I agree that this constitutes a weakness.
So yes, as long as it's borrowing quite that much from the iPod, it have been nice of them to give it at least a brief mention. Even better for their purposes if they'd approached it from a "we have all that AND recording AND an equalizer" direction.
The real weakness of the thing is that they couldn't possibly integrate it with even the major PC music management programs as well as the iPod goes with iTunes....an advantage that the Windows crowd can soon choose to share with us Mac users.
A note on battery life....I consistently get 10 hours out of my Rev. B iPod, but then I run it all the way down before recharging. I've actually run my iPod for a half an hour after all the bars are gone from the battery display! It's like having another gallon in the tank after the gas light goes on.