The new iPod design strikes me as being kind of dumb; I'm not sure why they'd move the buttons away from the scroll wheel, since this would make it significantly harder to use one-handed (especially in your pocket). The original iPod strikes me as being just about perfect, and I don't know why they've decided to mess with it.

Note that a 30 GB model seems like complete overkill, unless a) you have a 30+ GB hard drive on your computer, or b) you're willing to store most of your MP3s on your iPod, which I've found is annoying because you can't move MP3s back to your hard drive, and you can't burn CDs from an iPod.