No one is as surprised as me at the news, but as it turns out, people do use Zunes. I just caught a tweet from Todd Cochrane at RawVoice where he credited the brand new Zune Marketplace for providing 10% of the traffic received to his podcast for the last week's worth of episodes.
One thing is readily apparent. The Big Bold “Podcast” listing on the Zune Menu on the player, and the one click subscription method is going to really increase the reach of Podcasting.
Here is the main reason it may be more significant than iTunes and the iPod over time. In the iTunes menu you have to dig and dig to find Podcast but one thing that the folks at Zune did was make podcasting as prominent as music and the podcast content is easy to find.
So, while Todd's statistics may be impressive at the moment, it will be important to wait and see how much this will eventualy pan out to when the directory fills out a bit.