I'm still confused about what's going on. My model of a suspend mode is that when you apply power, the hardware becomes active, and then restores its state from some saved location. So if the saved state is crashed or hung or some such, you won't end up with a correctly running machine, but you should still be able to tell the difference between "does not power on at all" (hardware trouble) and "powers on but then restores to a crashed state" (needs proper reboot). The iPod gave me no feedback at all to distinguish the two cases!