Considering I'm not a major follower of portable music playing, I'm not the best person to say.
But "hipster theory of relativity" considering some of the anti-iPod people share my views on "indie hipster music" for one reasony or another, not really. Those for and against span all types of music lovers I think.
The fact other brands can be cheaper, have a better battery life, a battery that doesn't die, have storage in the same range (or better in some cases), can play larger ranges of file types (MP3, Wav, Ogg, FLAC, etc), work as drag and drop file storage for all data. As as having drag and drop music input that doesn't need to "register files" or just a product and OS bound application. And aren't used by every 14 year old with rich parents. Are a range of the reasons I've seen stated and have read about.
But as I said, I'm not a follower of portable music. I still have a genric brand 512meg SD flash card player from about 2/3 years ago.