Does it seem weird to anyone else that iTunes, ostensibly a music library program and music store interface, is now in charge of activating phones and tablet PCs, as well as managing their applications and shared files? Shouldn't there be a separate purpose built program for that?
Seems to fly in the face of Apple's vaunted design and organization.....
Again, it's all about the ecosystem. Apple created a content ecosystem for the iPod. (iTunes + Store) This was part of game change involved in the legitimizing of music download. Then this ecosystem added the iPhone as a content delivery system, which was a smart move but nothing revolutionary there. The kicker is that they then grew a software market ecosystem out of it!
Now that the App store is established, they could separate the iTunes app. However there are proximity advantages to be exploited here. iTunes is free iPhone advertising to everyone not yet on the iPhone who has an iPod.
I think this is spot on. It's not iTunes per se that is the connecting point for all these devices. It's the iTunes Store that binds all of these devices together—all of them are dependent on the store for content and applications. Getting the music player thrown in gratis alongside the iTunes Store is really inconsequential.
"There is no step three"... once you figure out you should use the program whose icon is a CD (who uses CDs for music when you have iTunes?) to manage your phone and tablet, neither of which have optical drives.
I don't think the CD metaphor for music is dead yet, but both the iPhone and iPad show the iTunes icon when they need to be connected (i.e. at activation).
There originally was... "iSync." However, Apple has all but forgotten this app exists, and the UI is very rudimentary anyways. About the only thing it was every used for was for handling old school file system syncing with Bluetooth and USB cell phones from about 3-5 years back.
iTunes seems like a very practical solution to me. Why confuse people with different apps? It would be more elegant, it makes people who love the compartmentalized UNIX philosophy happy and it just confuses everyone else. For most people the iTunes feature set: syncing, backup, restore, updating, organization, etc is a good thing. Having this process be mostly automatic is a big plus. I just can't imagine many people running iBackup on a regular basis to backup their device or iShare to put files on it, or iStore to buy music then opening iTunes to listen to it. Who has the patience for that?
Perhaps more importantly, everybody already has iTunes. Apple can leave out an entire step from the user experience (and one of the more frustrating ones, at that): "install new software".
Considering that installing iTunes on Windows automatically installs the Apple Software Update tool, which then try's to sneak Safari in (by automatically selecting it to "update" the next time Apple Software Update runs), I don't think Apple is too concerned about frustrating the user with the "Install new software" step. They seem to relish it actually. ;-)
Imagine the Internet Outrage they'd get over iTunes "installing all these new apps and who knows what spyware all over my computer". I agree with you, it sucks (though, it's not the end of the world) that it all goes through iTunes... and if they still only supported Macs, I bet they'd have broken some of this stuff out by now. But it's tricky in a Windows/Mac world.
When downloading podcasts, an activity that could be handled by a perl script and wget, iTunes likes to use my entire processor. I have no idea why, and its done so for several versions now.
I've so far avoided installing iTunes on my Win7 box, for much that same reason - it uses an obscene amount of resources, when I can use something like Foobar2000 with appropriate plugins to do the same job with no significant CPU or RAM footprint.
Seems to fly in the face of Apple's vaunted design and organization.....