I'm afraid I need to disagree with you. Palm engineering the Pre to "lie" about being an iPod is really no different than the way browsers "lie" about themselves by claiming to be one another in the user-agent string. E.g., IE 6 calls itself "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.1)".

If Palm was somehow arranging to play Apple's DRM'ed content, then that would represent a significantly different position, but Palm is quite clear they don't support this. Instead, by building the Palm to be a drop-in replacement for an iPod, then they work great with iTunes and presumably with other non-Apple music managers.

My non-lawyer opinion of interesting legal questions:

- Did Palm illegally reverse-engineer Apple technologies? This is probably more of a click-wrap issue than a DMCA issue, since they don't support Apple DRM content.

- Did Palm violate any Apple patents? We know Apple's already rattled around on this issue.

My guess is that the two companies end up signing a patent cross-licensing deal that explicitly allows Palm to be iTunes-compatible as they are now. Unclear which way the money would actually flow, but given that Palm has its own stack of patents, both companies would be crazy to try to litigate.