just had an alpine 9855r fitted with the Ipod adaptor KC210a running into the glove box.
Its a revelation and is definatley the way to go.
Sound qualtiy is awesome.

 

Think I'll end up going with the Denison cradle - although I don't really want full control from the HU - all I'll do on the HU is adjust the volume...

Going to get a PCMCIA card with USB2.0 on it to speed up transfers from the lappy - it's painfully slow at the minute - didn't realease USB2.0 was 40x quicker than USB1.1

 

If you've got the choice, I'd recommend getting a firewire card instead. Lots of people (myself included) had hassle using the iPod with USB2 on windows machines, and this was sorted by going to firewire.