Didn't find a bugzilla for libipoddevice so dumping it here.

With the new gvfs hal volume monitor, certain properties are read from the hal

 info.desktop.icon  # an icon name
 info.desktop.name  # the name to use for the device

that can be set both the storage and volume device objects. The hal-ipod-info callout should set these properties after it has investigated the ipod. For example

 info.desktop.icon -> "multimedia-player-ipod-video-white"
 info.desktop.name -> "David Zeuthen's iPod"

on the device object representing the drive (e.g. /dev/sda), and then, presto, this icon (including fallbacks) and name will be used throughout the desktop for all of it's volumes.

(Btw, in passing I thought i should mention that the gphoto2 backend just got merged into gvfs. That means that MTP devices are now available through gio just as if they were mass storage device. We still need to implement writing, it's read-only at the moment.)