The fun bit about Kindles being registered at the factory is that if you've ever bought a Kindle book before (on an old Kindle or an app) your books get pre-loaded as well. I wish they hadn't released a 3G-less model though; it's a major convenience boost (no need to even think about a network unless you're in a very remote bit of the country)
But iTunes is required to update my ipod to iOS 5 :-)
I've never been able to get large pdf's onto my ipod without itunes. Can't email them because they're too big, and the ipod cannot browse local shared directories.