Well, I switched from PC to PowerMac, and jemplode has pretty much worked as advertised. There has been a little bit of wonkiness; some new tracks came out with 65535 plays, and some old tracks which I deleted stuck around with a ref-count of zero. Both sets were easily found and fixed with jemplode. One caveat: jemplode requires that you run 2.0b11 (or better, assuming it ever arrives). So, if you prefer 1.03, your only option will be to complie the command-line tool.

I'm syncing over Ethernet. I can't speak for the USB support.

In terms of iTunes vs. lame, you can see my other thread about this. My current conclusion is that iTunes's Fraunhofer encoder is just fine, just set it to "highest" VBR quality. And, as a bonus, on my dual-CPU PowerMac, iTunes can compress the MP3s faster than the drive can read them. I've seen compression / extraction running at over 20x realtime. It's cool.

Of course, there are plenty of other reasons you may or may not want to switch, but that's a topic for another thread...