Why is it a pain to create playlists? As long as you've got it sorted Aritst->Album on your PC, it's just drag and drop. My empeg is all Genre->Artist->Album->Song, as are many many others on this board.

I've been thinking about this Alpine iPod rig for over a year, since they announced it. There's a couple other posts about it floating around on here. There's one.

It's a toss up between the empeg features vs. the iPod portability for me.