They also made it harder to use portable mp3 players. The first ones could be used as a simple usb drive. Try putting some music or anything else on an iphone today without installing app.
Apple would say that syncing through iTunes is easier than interacting with a filesystem.
As a concept, this leads into a debate about whether ideas like the Plan 9 operating system – where everything was a filesystem – are right or wrong. Clearly, some people love filesystem interfaces and would like to use that as a metaphor for all information systems. Apple's attitude with their iDevices has always been to use "appliance" interfaces to information systems and make filesystems an implementation detail.
What I see as being the "Apple way" is that they want to have control over what users can put on their devices, basically a form of DRM. Media players based on filesystems are immensely flexible and can be used for far more than just playing media --- a lot of them were basically a USB drive with a battery and an extra controller to read files off it and decode them into audio. Given that many people were already used to using USB drives, I doubt iTunes would've really been perceived as "easier"; instead of having to install and familiarise themselves with a new manner of software with its own interface, all they'd have to do is plug it in and copy the files to it utilising the same skills they already had.
On the other hand, Apple doesn't want you to be able to easily share your media with others, nor copy it off the player; no doubt under the influence of the RIAA and other pro-copyright, pro-DRM groups.
While I think concepts like Plan 9 may be going a bit too far, I strongly believe that the filesystem as a place to organise all your persistent data is ideal because of its power and freedom; IMHO the trend away from the filesystem is nothing but a way to force users into proprietary systems and control their actions. The companies and media groups don't want things like P2P filesharing, whether over the network or even casually between friends using physical media (look up the term "copyparty".) They don't want users to have that freedom. Hence they are driving them away from the concept of "files" in general, essentially attempting to deprecate and push that out of the mind of users so that as an end-goal, they ultimately will not ever realise that sharing with or giving something to others could be, and was, at one time as easy as copy-paste.
I think I'm not the only one who saw the USB-sticks-turned-media-players and thought "that's just right", and abhorred Apple's proprietary overengineered solution; but in the end, it seems Apple's marketing won...
