Finally I can do away with my cobbled together perl/Applescript solution because itunes does exactly what I want.

Being able to browse Apple's podcast directory is nice - all the podcasts I listen to are there, although the iTunes store interface is way too busy for my liking.

And since Podcasts are treated quite seperately t music tracks, I can set the preference to auto-sync them even though I have my music set to manual sync.

On the iPod (with the associated iPod software update), Podcasts appear as a sepatae entry under the Music menu. Each podcast feed gets a menu item, and behind that the actual sound files themselves are arranged. In iTunes, this is replicated by a triangle pop-down type list, keeping all your podcasts nicely organised.

I used to do this using Genre, Grouping and smart playlists allocated by my old perl/Applescript combo but this is much cleaner.