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CD players are great for their intended purpose, but it's not the same as the flash players.
The selling point for flash memory players is that they are solid state, ie no moving parts, which makes them ideal for jogging, etc and this is therefore historically the major market for these players.
CD based players must, logically, 'skip' when subject to constant random motion because there is a laser moving across a disc. Mini hard-drive based players such as the standard iPod itself are similarly affected, although they have a buffer that tends to compensate for this problem. However, you have to question the wisdom of purchasing and indeed the long-term wear and tear to any hard-drive based player that's constantly in 3-D motion.
The fundamental problem with flash players is that they are well behind the mini hard-drive based players in terms of memory capacity. Top of the line flash players only get 1 Gig - HD players up to 40 Gig. So, at the moment at least, it's a trade-off between capacity and size/purpose.
Having said all of that though, the stupidity of Apple's product is that it's an 'entry level' machine, stripped of the sort of features that are now standard in all other similar products, which puts Apple several YEARS behind the rest of the marketplace.
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