I am one of the people that has ideological problems with the app store, but after reading the article I chose not to upvote it. It seams to ignore all of the things that the app store does provide that have been enumerated in many comments here already. As much as I am annoyed when Apple fans upvote or downvote things on HN based solely on loyalty to the brand, I can't give the linked article much credit.

I did find this link from a comment on the article page interesting though:

http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/ch03.html#ch03_...