> It is gated by iTunes, just not 100%

I bought an iPod Mini in '04 that I used for a summer photography course as an external hard drive. An actual external hard drive would have been cheaper, but after my summer trip was over and I no longer needed the additional storage space — hey, I had an iPod Mini! I copied photos onto it from a CF card via USB. It was literally drag and drop. There was no iTunes gating. You're just... wrong here.

I had an iPod filled with music that I ripped from CDs and downloaded. It was absolutely a thing.

You just can't admit being wrong huh?

The ipod was launched two years before the itunes store. Even after the itunes store launched, you could just still load your other music into itunes if you wanted. All music was sideloaded (i.e transfered directly over USB) onto ipods at this point

You don't seem to know any of this history and are just making things up. I don't think Apple had to pay any money for the right to sell music via the iTunes store. What they did do was add DRM to music sold through the store, at least until they were big enough to renegotiate in 2009.