Here is a poll - Apple Tv vs all its competitors - XBox, Vudu, Tivo and others. It would be interesting to see which product people prefer:
http://www.appleteevee.blogspot.com/

Wow, I thought you had to work for NBC to make decisions this bad! Take the show that's getting the most word-of-mouth from the teenage generation they most want to reach, and stop offering it on the medium those people use the most. Brilliant!

And I don't even watch the show. But this is really so moronic, it sounds like an NBC business decision.

Well the last time I checked, CW didn't have Smallville episodes online either; why should they have Gossip Girl episodes online?

Hmmm, wasn't streaming content one of the issues in the writers' strike (and was lampooned pretty well on this week's South Park as Canada went on strike and demanded some of that internet money)? Well, no streaming video, no residual pay to the writers! Problem solved, right! Gossip Girl has already been picked up for next season, so as long as it retains the ratings it had before the strike, it's certainly not in danger of cancellation (unless, of course, the strike completely derailed any momentum it had which worries me about shows like Pushing Daisies and Chuck, that won't see new episodes until fall).

It seems more like an experiment to see if people will buy them on iTunes.