I am extremely biased cos my hubby works for 3DLabs, which is a subsidiary of Creative, so we get employee rates. Having said that, I have always found my Creative MP3 players reliable, easy to use and highly functional. I currently have a MuVo with only 512mb of memory, but that is more than enough for my purposes - approx 8 hours of music. They are available in larger capacity I think. And it is about the size of two cigarette lighters, not a brick!
The plus, too, is that you can upload stuff from it back onto your PC, which, I understand, you cant do with the iPOD. This can be useful as a general data transfer key as well as for swapping music around the place. I also like the fact that it plugs straight into your USB port, no cable.
And they come in pretty colours
Can't comment on any other brand cos I don't know enough about them.