I think it depends on what you buy. I really like play.com so I get a lot of stuff there but I generally use iTunes for classical music because it's cheap as hell and you can listen to 30 seconds before you buy so you know it's a good recording of the piece in question.

You do now get the artwork on iTunes and there's rumors that we'll soon be getting lyrics too so who knows, we may soon be getting closer to your ideal. Also, you can buy music on iTunes, archive it to CD and then do what you want with it. Mind you there is one drawback, it results in doubly compressed music, Apple compressed it once to get the AAC they give you, you then compress it again to get your MP3/ogg file so you loose quality, so you're right, the best music out there is still on a CD. It's digital and totally DRM free!

Bart.