I wonder if you could get
rockbox to run on the G4. Or on the empeg for that matter.
Yes. Would be reasonably easy actually particularly given that the hardware is pretty well known. Still a fair bit of work though. When I helped with porting it to the Toshiba Gigabeat (which already ran Linux on an ARM9) I had the idea of running it as an application under Linux.
Instead they created it as a standalone application and it really does work well - so much better than the original rubbish that it came with. Rockbox is still missing some empeg features though.