Mailing the story:

Along comes Apple with the new iPod Touch and throws a few SHA1 hashes into the start of the database which not only locks it to your iPod but prevents anyone from fiddling with the file format. Actually, that is not true. You can fiddle with the format, and you can try and sync with something other than iTunes. It won't work though, because iTunesDB will report that it contains precisely zero songs if you do.