Why is purchasing stuff from your phone an attractive feature? Network is slow compared to your wifi at home. Is there really a single you just have to have on the train on the way home? This is a non-feature for me and I doubt that they will do it either. Since the data plan is "unlimited" AT&T has no reason to want Apple to artificially pump up the data usage by downloading songs they way they might want if you were paying by the byte...
As far as the next iPod, I'm fairly confident that it will be identical to the iPhone except that the only functionality will be whats under the iPod tab on the iPhone. All the same stuff the iPod does now but with the larger screen and new multi-touch interface.
It would be neat if they could add in some of the other stuff, like the camera, but I doubt it. And I doubt that it would have all the other networking features and web browsing capability minus the phone. But time will tell
I do suspect that Apple would like to get completely away from hard disk based players, they just dont hold up under heavy use and the occasional drop from a height. So I also expect that future versions will be entirely flash memory based, except for the largest, take your entire iTunes library with you, version which will still be available with a disk.
But what do I know?
