Having the iPod hide the file system is the number one complaint I hear from people who own one. It works "okay" as long as you stay within Apple's ecosystem and can completely bomb if you venture onto other hardware/software/use cases.
Well, I can't disagree with your anecdote regarding complaints (although I have owned both iPod and iPad since they were released and have never had a problem beyond the iTunes file transfer flow being awful), BUT the constraint to the Apple ecosystem and the iTunes flow are implementation details orthogonal to the actual hiding of the filesystem (i.e. it is easy to see how Apple could make file sharing easier without introducing the concept of a filesystem).
