And that couldn't possibly be because the GOP has systematically filibustered any piece of legislation from the democrats in the senate that they have the slightest issue with, basically making it impossible for anything to come up for a vote.

The iPod Touch isn't an MP3 player, it's a non-cellular iPhone equivalent for using iPhone apps on that also happens to play mp3s. If you JUST wanted an mp3 player, you'd get an iPod Nano.

Your figures are still way off. 180,000 cubic feet / 5,097 cubic meters is the spec for how much helium they're using, the 850,000 cubic meters is the volume at full altitude and minimal atmospheric pressure.

Obligatory XKCD link: http://xkcd.com/627/

The iPad will happily associate with your existing iTunes account and use all the same content.

As for the speaker, it's a stereo speaker, but both sides are in the same place (so you don't lose any sound to mono conversion, but you're not getting the "stereo" experience either). Of course you can always plug in external stereo speakers or headphones as usual.

Then you're missing the major draw of what the TiVo can do. The draw of the TiVo isn't that it's a fancy VCR that you don't have to put tapes in, it is that you tell the TiVo what kind of programming you like and it GOES OUT AND FINDS IT FOR YOU. That means that it'll chase down your favorite program when the network decides to go hide it in another time slot. It'll look at the programming you like and find similar programs to record in the free space you've got left over (if you don't disable the feature). All these things require a constant source of program data, something that doesn't come free.

When a microSD card can hold all the map data you could possibly need, I really doubt that weight considerations are a reason to strip down the size of a mapping dataset anymore.