Yes, and there are a hundred and two established mobile phone manufacturers who are already making the phone equivalent of an iPod shuffle. Apple did NOT spend as much time and money as it has done on the R and D of the iPhone to then take the wind out of its sails with a mediocre piece of crap that looks exactly like the product they are so blatently moving away from.
Well, now hold on there. Nobody's suggesting the iPhone nano would have the iPod shuffle's interface. The question is whether it'll have a clickwheel based interface, which is a tried and tested and extremely popular iPod technology - arguably it's what made the iPod so popular in the first place.
The iPhone interface is optimal for a large unit used for web browsing and watching movies. It isn't, from what I can see, as good as the iPod when it comes to listening to music. Close, perhaps, but the iPod's clickwheel is relatively optimal for non-visual use. Imperfect in some ways, but when it comes to changing the volume, clicking to the next track (or beginning of the current one, or previous one), pausing, unpausing, etc, you can't really get much better.
Advocating that a smaller iPhone should have the iPhone interface requires at least some justification beyond "The current interface is a 'mediocre piece of crap'" (tens of millions of iPod users would disagree with you on that one), or "That's where Apple is heading anyway". How would the iPhone interface improve upon the iPod interface for the iPod's primary purpose of listening to music? Would the presence of a clickwheel in some way undermine the iPhone nano's ability to be a phone, thus forcing the use of a touchscreen-only UI?
Does anyone around here understand the word ANTICLIMAX???!!!
I'm conservative when it comes to UI changes. There are many features I've seen added over the years that have caused no end of trouble and made computers less easy to use and understand. If it aint broke, don't fix it.
In this case, an interesting new UI is being apparently advocated for a device it would appear to be wholly unsuited for. As it is, with the lack of voice control or other forms of non-visual control on the iPhone, I'm not even convinced the iPhone is the "perfect" device its advocates pretend it is. It's a little like going back to 1984, and seeing the first Macintosh, in a sea of DOS clones. Because back then the Macintosh may have been revolutionary, but it also sucked. It was badly lacking in functionality. A small vocal minority loved it, and a large vocal group wanted to nothing to do with it.
Over time, that was fixed. The technologies were developed by Apple and others, and everyone started to get an idea of what computers should do and how to integrate the advances made by different groups with different needs into something close to an universal ideal. Companies like Commodore-Amiga, Acorn, Digital Research, and even Microsoft, did amazing things that ultimately made the concept of the GUI viable.
So don't get me wrong. When I'm saying the iPhone doesn't appear to be as perfect as its claimed, I'm not saying that the technologies that make it up are bad. But they're absolutely not fully developed yet. It'll take time before we can start to throw systems based upon it upon everything.
An iPhone nano with a multitouch UI may be fun, but it's unquestionably not an optimal platform for such a UI, not in its current state. If the device is supposed to be just an MP3 player married to a cellphone, the device is over-engineered in the wrong direction, and lacking in basic usability in others, if it goes the "all touchscreen, all the time" route.
The clickwheel's a great interface, don't knock it.