Like we said yesterday, the mystery is gone; anyone who had been wondering when Apple would finally get a Windows version of the iTunes Music Store up and running now knows that it's going to happen on Thursday. Members of the press have all received invitations to an Apple media event slated for October 16th, at which "the year's biggest music story is about to get even bigger." Like us, you probably first assumed that this had something to do with Britney and Justin "doing the thing" (that girl is a poet), but after a while we realized that Apple's marketing department might consider the launch of the iTMS to be somehow more important. Hey, it takes all kinds.

And by the way, where's our frickin' invite?! Yeah, that's right, Steve-- we're talkin' to you! Punk. Oh, sure, we may not be "accredited," we might not technically qualify as "press," and we may once have been "arrested" for "indecent exposure" after crashing a press event in 1994. But is that any reason, or even three reasons, to snub us when dishing out the invites to what will surely be the non-nude accredited press event of the season?

Okay, we seem to have wandered a bit.

What we're trying to get at is, what if the iTMS for Windows is only part of the story? After all, it does seem a little odd that Apple would rent out Moscone for an invitation-only press kegger if all it plans to do is intro a service that everyone knows is due by the end of the year anyway. It's not out of the question, then, that the iTMS for Windows will take center stage as a cavalcade of guest stars transforms what might have been a yawner of a one-trick pony into a veritable extravaganza of musicky unveilings. You know, kind of like Circus of the Stars, only with Apple products. And without so much Brooke Shields in fishnets and a sparkly leotard-thing (as far as we know).

Well, MacRumors has a Page 2 report stapled to a big ol' salt lick which predicts that the iTMS launch on Thursday will coincide with the release of iTunes 5 for Macintosh and Windows, which not only brings cross-platform support to Apple's pay-per-download music service, but also allegedly introduces an "all-new interface," something called iTMS "listener loans," and (gag) support for Microsoft's Windows Media format-- probably a necessary evil, at least on the playback end, if iTunes is to have half a chance of catching on over there on the Windows side of the fence.

But wait, that's not all! In addition to iTunes 5, we're allegedly also getting a slew of new iPod peripherals-- a "recording device," a dock that allows the playback of "movies and photos on a television," an adapter that accepts Secure Digital and CompactFlash cards to facilitate the offloading of digital photos to the iPod, and a Bluetooth wireless headphone system. And while you might rightly find some of this about as believable as Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent in Mary Poppins, hey, what's a little unbridled optimism between friends?