What I mean, is that iTunes is an enormous development expense. It's also long established as the market leading music management application. Palm could not afford the expense of time nor money to make their own music management application. That much is obvious.

But instead of making their own bridging application that could look at one's iTunes music collection and then shuttle the appropriate files to the Pre, they went ahead and just implemented the current hack.

They could have also gone a different route and licensed SongBird. But they thought it would be easier and more convenient to leverage Apple's investment and property.