This is an absolute great article and this is what many of us have been saying for a long, long time. XM had previously used their internet radio service to continue channels removed from the regular sat service. Sirius did this with The Bridge and then when they added the The Bridge back to the sat service, the replaced it with Shuffle. Yes it is true that you won't get them in your car, but they are available online.
The other part of this that this article doesn't even mention well sort of mentions. You take devices like the SL100 or SL2 which offered the Internet Radio via Wifi on a device. This means that rather you are at home, hot spot, work where ever there is wifi you could get all these channels. Sirius charged $2.99 just for the premium service. Why not make that $4.99 and also give us an additional 10 channels of music or if you want to go $6.99, you get 20 extra channels of music, that you can stream via your device or via the web on a computer.
This just makes total sense to me, but yet with the recent changes Sirius XM purged off all those channels that were not on sat except for a couple and those are talk. They are totally heading in the wrong direction? Ask me does this surprise me that this company hasn't the foresight to see what the rest of us do? Not one bit, they always seem to miss the boat.
If they would release a application for the iPhone/iPod Touch, this would easily work to stream these additional channels. The SL2 and SL100 are already in a position to make use of this. This was my one bone to pick with the XMp3 device that was released, no wifi and in my opinion this was a huge oversight.