I might be showing my age here, but I remember when buying a new iPhone also meant making sure you had a desktop with the latest version of iTunes installed. Without that key piece of Apple software, your shiny new iPhone 3GS was basically an Apple-branded brick. No iTunes meant no iPhone.
iTunes was a relic of the iPod era, back when devices didn't have cellular data connections or even Wi-Fi connectivity. It managed your music player for you, and Apple kept it around for the fledgling iPhone as well. This made the user experience far less fun than it should have been.
