Yes..woop. Nothing particularly revolutionary about that. It's just been a bit slow coming. *shrugs* Never felt the need for it anyway. it sits in my pocket all the time, so i don't give much of a damn how bright the screen is, unless it' so bright that it's showing through my jeans o.0
Alongside the announcement that the screens on the latest iPods are brighter, it was also announced that there is a screen brightness control in the latest software. It's primarily for the benefit of watching videos on the full size iPod 5G or 5.5G or whatever we're calling it.
My guess is that this latest iPod didn't even originally have it, but was slated to get a brighter backlight from the beginning. Then, they started doing focus groups and people started complaining that the new backlight was too bright.
The same thing sort of happened with a lot of PDAs and handhelds. My Axim lives on the lowest brightness setting. Which is close to the max of my iBook. I know too that a lot of people reported that they keep their Nintendo DS units near the lowest backlight level.
So basically I think it just started becoming an issue as the small backlight technology got brighter and brighter. I hope we get to the day soon where what happened with my Axim happens with notebooks.