OK, you asked for it!
I apologize for the length of this post, but I am passionately opposed to the Honda MusicLink - at least as far as the Accord integration (if you can call it that) goes.
When you plug your iPod in, the Honda iPod link completely disables the iPod interface and requires you to use the controls on the car's audio head unit. OK, not the best situation but I can learn how to use the head unit control, right? In the Accord, the head unit doesn't show any artist, album, song, playlist, etc. info on the display, so you never know what's playing. The iPod is recognized as some kind of alternate CD device or something along those lines. Worse, it requires you to install software on your PC that uses the Microsoft text-to-speech engine to index and announce the content (taking up space for the speech files on the iPod in the process). The Honda TTS (Text To Speech) software adds roughly 30 minutes to my iPod sync process every single time. 30 MINUTES!
Let's get to the in car experience. Let's say I wanted to search for ZZ Top by artist, as an extreme example. I'd have to switch myself to Disc 2 on the CD changer (which corresponds to the search by artist function), then wait while my iPod played back/spoke A... B... C... D... and so on until it got to Z. Then I hit the seek button twice and wait while it announces every artist that begins with Z until it gets to ZZ Top. OK, now that I'm at ZZ Top, let's say I wanted to listen to a specific album by ZZ Top. I'm afraid not! Once you get to the artist, your only choice is to start playing every song by that artist sequentially in alphabetical order of the albums, or by random shuffle. If I wanted to listen to a specific album, I'd have to go through the alphabetical Steven Hawking-esque spoken listing search process again to search for a specific album. That is, of course, if I can even understand what the <bleep> it's saying. Hit the wrong button. make a mistake, or miss your artist/album/genre/playlist when spoken? You're starting over from A... B... C...
This is the kind of product that really makes you wonder what company could possibly spec, build, test, and demo a product this bad and decide it was exactly what they wanted to release to their customers. And that's the problem - according to Honda this is exactly how the product is supposed to work in the Accord. The documentation goes through every step of this horrific process like it's obviously the way things should be done. I simply have no patience for technology that makes simple tasks more difficult. Especially something as simple and elegant as the iPod interface.
Here is a link to a blog posting online where a similarly disappointed user goes into much greater detail...
http://www.nuxx.net/hondamusiclink.html
So, the point of my rant is to simply warn any prospective Honda Accord customers to stay far far far far FAR away from this abysmal product. Even if you're not going for the Accord - DO YOUR RESEARCH FIRST! It sounds like maybe the integration with the Honda Fit is a bit better, but in that case they shouldn't sell such a substandard product for use in other car models.
I hope that Brian Cooley or anyone else who reviews cars for CNET reads this and thinks about it if the Honda MusicLink ever comes their way in another Honda car model. I sincerely believe that any prospective customers should be very careful and quite specific when asking Honda exactly how this product works with their car.
WHEW! That feels better.
I'd also interested to know if anybody has had experience with a third-party iPod car connection kit that might work with my Honda. I'm thinking about checking out the Harmon Kardon Drive+Play.