I've bought a
lot of music from the iTunes Store. Probably about half of my library (exact count based on a smart playlist searching for the word "protected" is approximately 4,800 tracks, including video content as well).
That's actually rather frightening now that I look at it....
In my case, I don't care about the 128kbps bit rate, as I rip all of my music to that anyway, since I really can't hear the difference between that and anything higher (I've done blind ABX tests of my own to confirm this), and I don't find the DRM overly restrictive (in fact, it's probably the least-restrictive DRM out there).
In my case, I've made a conscious decision about the convenience factor versus the restrictions that this imposes upon me. I don't have the time to go shopping for CDs, nor do I have the space to store them. I have 400 CDs on my shelves already that have not been out of their cases since they were first imported into iTunes two years ago, and now I only buy the occasional CD for something that I
really want that isn't available on iTunes, or that is a collector's item (ie, I want the liner notes and packaging).
I know that it will be a pain should I ever want to move away from an iPod-based world, but I don't see that happening any time soon, since I'm otherwise an all-Mac user. The fact that I can burn all of these tracks to CD is enough for me to feel future-proofed, and despite the paranoid ramblings of the anti-DRM folks, I don't expect Apple would ever reduce the burning restrictions to the point where I
wouldn't be able to burn the tracks to CD at all.
Frankly, the effort of burning vs ripping is pretty much the same as far as I'm concerned. I have a friend who buys music from the iTunes Store and burns every album to CD as he buys it, just to have a backup. It's actually technically
easier than ripping, since you're not dealing with potentially dodgy track info from CDDB that has to be corrected.