I'm not quite certain what the point of the two rants are. Virtally any decent backup or sync applocation can do all the things you say can't be done. Are you referring to copying the Keychain in the Finder or what?

I set up a quick little set in Retrospect 6 that went to ~/Library and quickly backed up apploication support, caches, Safari, and keychain, something like 36MB in less than a minute. ALL priveledges were maintained. I backed them up to a "set" (single file) but could have chosen a duplicate just as well which would have made all files available in the Finder.

(Fortunately my iPod Photo 60 had plenty of room at the time.). I routinely backp iCal and Address Book with iSync (which also backs them up to .Mac). I do the same with text documents.

There are many iPod backup apps out there which do the same things listed above although I doubt they assure that correction permissions are applied and likely some don't verify the backup, i.e., double check each file has been copied consecutive. On the whole I think Retrospect 6 (Desktop version in my case) did a creditable job of backing up 36 MB in less than a minute, veerifying it and making sure permissions were correct.

And the backup was incremental meaning the backup on the pod will change as the original on the Mac changes. What exactly is your complaint?