FM Radio on the iPod Touch?

This kind of thing ticks me off.

Rumor site 9to5Mac reports that Apple is on the cusp of releasing an FM radio application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. And get this: it will be for the current models, not for some new hardware revision. According to the rumor, Apple will awaken the slumbering FM transceiver already dormant within the devices, currently only used to talk to the Nike+ widget.

So, here I have had an iPod Touch 2G for almost a year, and that whole time FM capability has been lying dormant within it. I do everything with my Touch. Yard work, exercise, driving - it's always there. Of course, to do any of that stuff you have to download what you want to listen to first since you won't have any WiFi available. However, if Apple had just activated the hardware that I had already bought, I could have been listening to sports radio without any worries or additional devices.

Here's a good example. I was reseeding the yard this weekend and wanted to listen to the NCSU game. I can still pick up a WiFi signal in my yard, so I thought, "Hey - I'll find a webcast of the radio station (101.5 FM), and listen to the game using my iPod Touch!" Uh, no. They are blocked from streaming the game over the web, even though they are broadcasting it over FM. If you want to listen to Wolfpack games on the web you have to buy a game pack from the website, which at that point I was not inclined to do. And now I find out that all along the solution to this little problem is a tiny chip packed inside my Touch, the capabilities of which I have already purchased and yet Apple thinks I don't need to use.

Thanks, Apple - that's very kind of you. Let me guess, to enable this I will have to pay another $10 dollars to upgrade my Touch, just like I had to buy v3.0 to enable Bluetooth?