Apple has definitely stumbled upon the right idea. You can buy what you want and only what you want, at a fair price. And they have built an elaborate service to support it all, complete with sampling of songs, videos, and information. The sampling is a biggie.... it makes a huge difference when you are shopping for music if you can hear it first. My primary reason for the times I've used MP3 swapping software has not been to pirate music, per se, but to sample it before buying the CD (particularly since a lot of what I like is not available in a typical corner CD store.)

I can see their reason behind using AAC over MP3 format, due to their need for digital rights management which MP3 doesn't support ( http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2003/04/20030429195456.shtml ), but that's one part of Digital Media I do not like, although it's probably inevitable to make downloadable music a reality. Once I purchase music, I would like the right to do with it as I like, as long as it's only for myself. For example, any music I purchase, I eventually want to incorporate into a centralized digital music library (including the option to convert the format to one of my own choosing,) which would allow any device with access to it to play music from it (which in my house, could easily become more than 3 devices.) Having to manage "authorization" of AAC files in this library could become difficult, but that's something I haven't experimented with yet.

Anyway, I hope to post a more complete review of Apple's Music Store later this week on my own blog, after I've had a chance to really try it out.