How many songs can the 8 gigabite "iPod touch" hold?

What it basically means is that if you do not have anything else that takes up data space, it will hold either 1750 songs, 10000 photos, or 10 hours of video. Only one of those. Or it can have a combination of all. There is no really way of knowing how much your iPod touch can really hold however. It's just an estimate.

IT also depends on what bit rate music files you use. I use 320kbps mono songs (I'm deaf in one ear, thanks to acoustic neuroma surgery), which are equivalent is size to 160kps stereo song files. 1,615 songs of mine take up 7.1GB of space. Of course an "8GB" capacity isn't REALLY 8GB of user files. For example, the "16GB" Touch holds just 14.5GB of user data.

Only one of those? Actually, no.

On my 8GB touch I have 15.6 hours of music, 9 hours of movies, 2.5 hours of TV shows, 17.2 hours of audiobooks, plus photos, apps, e-mails from work ... and about 1.3 GB still free!

There is no really way of knowing how much your iPod touch can really hold however

???
Yes there is.
It can hold right at 7.4 GB of data.
The actual number of songs, videos, photos, etc. it holds will be dependent on the format and bitrate, but it can total only 7.4GB.