From a user's point of view the App Store (on every Apple platform, from tvOS to the Watch) is an incredibly bad deal, with awesome offerings.
* The centralised payment really incentivises users to buy apps (myself included, I find myself thinking about buying something a lot less when only having to trust one source with my information, and that source ensures that their system works well for me).
* iCloud Sync is a really big bonus for most of the work-related apps I bought and it's painfully missing when you read that devs pulled their software from the store and you cannot access it anymore.
* The fact that I can comfortably download all the software I bought without keeping track of it is a bonus - if I ever have to reset a device, it's a giant bonus.
And the negatives:
* It stifles innovation -- content discovery is almost impossible! Within two clicks you can arrive at endless lists of shovel-ware - the top lists are almost completely unusable in my region as a way to find new and interesting apps. Same goes for categories (on stores that even have a somewhat OK system of categories). The Watch / TV stores are horrible! For some reason I always seem to run out of content to browse, even tho there are (possibly) hundreds of thousands of apps on that platform. The only half-acceptable way I found to look for new stuff is to browse Apple's curated collections (which almost always are very samey). Now I wouldn't say this is worse than Google Play, for example, I recently browsed through it and had a similar experience, however that should be enough to call attention to the issue, since the Apple app store is usually considered more sophisticated
* Search: it's not very good, from the App Store to Apple Music tolerance on misspelling names or searching for approximates is bad.
* You're forced to only use their system of delivery, unless you're on macOS (which's future is looking dubious on that front as well), so you're inherently forced to deal with the negatives, without having a choice of other ecosystems.
I love my Apple products, I've almost completely switched to their ecosystem within the last two years, but I am really hoping to see as much work on these issues as on the pull-up music player menu on the Control Center. Just because the competition is not on another, better level, it does not mean that having to constantly Google to discover great new apps is acceptable.