I think you are ebing particularly unfair.
If I but a PC with a 1TB drive and it had 20% of its available storage taken up by OS and bundled software - I would still have 800GB to play with.
But an 8GB ipod touch being left with 5.5GB-6GB of usable media storage is absolutely shocking.
I'm an apple fan (household has 2 iphones and more ipods than I care to count) so this isnt apple bashing, but the advertisign is VERY miselading to joe public - perhaps no more so than any PC manufacturer but as I said above the impact on a PC is so much less than it is on a memory constrained device like an ipod.
Of course if apple included an SD slot all this could be easilly resolved ... :-)