This post on gizmodo implies that the photo cable may work with some of the older non-photo ipods. Belkin (i think) has offered this functionality for quite a while through an ipod accessory, but it was widely panned as being slow and taking an entire ipod battery to copy a one gig card.

I think it's a bit early to pass judgement on the Apple photo downloading cable, but it remains to be seen if apple is going to do it right. As it stands now, the ipod photo only has the ability to view photos that have been resized and reformatted by iTunes. Having the iPod resize and generate its own thumbnails is non-trivial. An iPod that could download canon raw files and show the thumbnails would get my attention quickly, however.

Matthew