I've loaded mine up with audiobooks and podcasts and it's fantastic. VoiceOver does a great job, even pronounces "colbert" properly for Stephen Colbert's book - they must have hard coded a bunch of names into the Alex voice.
I've made playlists of all the albums I have on it so I can easily choose which one I want to listen to. Despite the focus of the product I'm not really a shuffler but I do love my playlists so to able to load a bunch of them on and be easily able to access them is great.
I own all three versions of the shuffle and whilst I think Apple may have been better served to just make a 4GB version of the 2G model and added the VoiceOver/playlist support to it I still think it will sell by the truckload.
After all, the vast majority of people out there in the real world are perfectly happy with the apple headphones - just look around the bus or train next time and count the white earbuds. We here on the forums sometimes get a little forgetful that we don't inhabit the same space as the overwhelming majority of the general public and it's the general public that will snap these things up with reckless abandon.
It's a good product, not a great product like the 16GB nano or the 2G touch but then it's only $129 and for that price it's a steal.
