What has made Apple’s iPod so difficult for competitors to beat over the past few years is vision and product planning. Today we saw both in action as Apple completely revamped its market-leading line of music and video entertainment devices, just in time for the 2007 holiday.

From the beginning Apple has carefully orchestrated the iPod’s ecosystem, evolving the hardware, software, and online presence carefully as technology has improved and consumers have gotten more comfortable living a digital lifestyle. It’s almost as if the past five years has led to this moment — Apple’s most evolved iPod ecosystem to date.

At “The Beat Goes On” event in San Francisco, Apple’s Steve Jobs presented a clearly-defined line of iPods, including the new iPod Touch, and introduced capability that iPod owners have been clamoring for — the ability to download music from the Internet directly into their devices. This is now possible on the iPod Touch and the iPhone through the new iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store.

Apple’s iPod line now looks like this:

At a special press event held at the Ministry of Sound in London this morning, Nokia introduced “Ovi” the company’s new consumer facing Internet services brand, and in doing so, took aim at Apple, its mobile carrier “partners”, and — to a lesser extent — dot com giants Google and Yahoo.

At launch, “Ovi”, which means ‘door’ in Finnish, will encompass the highly anticipated Nokia Music Store, a revamped N-Gage (Nokia’s mobile gaming platform — see our earlier report), as well as Nokia Maps, a navigation service that offers maps and city guides. The first version of Ovi.com, which can be accessed either directly from a compatible Nokia device or from a PC, is scheduled to go live in English during the fourth quarter of 2007, with additional features and languages added during the first half of 2008.

Nokia also announced two new N-Series phones, the N81 (music phone) and the Nokia N95 (8 GB). “The later with its large screen and higher storage capacity clearly is being launched as a way to ward off the Apple iPhone challenge”, writes Om Malik, over at GigaOm.

Additionally, the company gave a sneak preview of its next generation User Interface, dubbed the “Experience Suite”, which will be applied first to new N-Series devices. The Inquirer describes the UI as being iPhone-like, in which the user is able to “navigate between applications using one flick of the thumb”, and applications are found by “shuffling through various panes.”