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I find it amusing that iTunes partisans are reduced to arguing that Apple DRM is no big deal because you can crack it anyway.
Techies dislike DRM on the principle of the thing, not because it actually presents meaningful barriers. Indeed, the fact that DRM presents no meaningful barriers and is simply an inconvenience for the consumer is a big part of the argument against it. There's no reason an online music store should require you to violate the DMCA just to enjoy fair use of your purchased content, and a store that asks you to do so - no matter which particular entity on the supply chain is imposing that restriction - does not deserve patronage.
Farhad is essentially right in that right now Amazon is superior to iTunes in just about every quantifiable way, and that unlike iTunes, Amazon is entirely DRM-free. As a matter of principle, Amazon is better. As a practical consumer matter, Amazon is probably better. If you dig the iTunes interface, that's your prerogative, but myself I'd rather have a simple browser-based store than a proprietary closed-source standalone program that hogs resources and insists on being my media player. Besides, the nice thing about a browser-based store is that browsers are part of a whole modular, interoperable philosophy that allow you to choose your own programs for each task instead of vertically integrating everything into one behemoth. If you still want to use iTunes to play your Amazon tracks, you can.
Mind you, I find the speculation that Amazon's current offerings are subsidized price- and consumer-rights-wise by labels hoping to establish a viable iTunes competitor convincing. Of course, this seems merely like an additional reason to get while the getting's good (and give labels some market data about what sort of prices for digital music consumers find acceptable in the process). I won't complain about an opportunity to exploit their moment of desperation for all it's worth...
Oh, and transcoding your MP3s into audio CDs for backup purposes is just asinine and a waste of data storage (unless you're one of those stick-in-the-muds that still use CD-audio only players, of course). Backing up your data is a good thing, backing up your data in a format that takes up 10x the space and requires you to constantly swap discs is silly and framing the additional inconvenience as somehow a "perk" for iTunes is delusional. Copy your MP3 collection onto a few DVD-Rs or an external hard drive or something.
