Interesting look back at The original iPod, 10 years later in review format, over at ars technica.
Of interesting note to the "silly apple people who can't change their batteries" folks is this paragraph:
"But Jacqui," you're yelling at the screen, "aside from the hard drive and click wheel, the battery is the next most likely thing to die over time!" This does tend to be true, especially of battery tech from 10 years ago. But the original iPod in its heyday was no wimp--Apple bragged of a 10-hour battery life, which was impressive by 2001 MP3 player standards. We hardly expected to get 10 hours out of a 10-year-old battery, but when messing with our little Apple artifact, we did manage to squeeze out a solid eight hours of music jamming before it petered out. Not bad, iPod, not bad.
Not that batteries don't crap out, but maybe not as fast as you'd expect.