I have been shunning the Mac App Store so far. When it was new, I launched it once and then immediately removed it from my Dock. I did not like that Apple and their 30% cut gets between me and the developer, that there are no free trials, that you need both an iTunes account (even though the application may be free) to download applications and a local System Administrator account to install them (even though they could be installed into your home directory rather than system-wide, which is the way I prefer to install things), and that a single company gets to keep track of all my applications (that part is even more disturbing with the Kindle store, by the way, because they can track what I read, and judging from the recommendation mails Amazon sends out they are making good use of that information).

But of course, this system is gaining popularity rapidly, and it has a lot of advantages, too. Installing applications from the App Store is much safer than a random download from the Internet, both because Apple vets the applications, and because they (will very soon) enforce sandboxing, which prevents applications from doing bad things. You do not need to care about making backups of the install media or keeping track of license keys: Everything is tied to your iTunes account and can be re-downloaded at any time. Prices have come down a lot (probably mostly because of increased sales volume, maybe also because of increased competitive pressure), both for the applications per se, but also if you have multiple computers, because per-seat licensing is gone: you can install the applications on as many computers you want (with some exceptions in the Pro area).

And of course, there is no real alternative anymore when it comes to Apple's own software.

I just bought Keynote, Apple's answer to Powerpoint, because I need to prepare a presentation for next week. I have been doing these things with OpenOffice so far, but was getting increasingly annoyed by that program's sluggishness and ugliness. I had not bought any office productivity software since Claris Works back in the day, iWork (Keynote, Pages, Numbers) seemed a bit pricey at $79 considering how rarely I really need it, not to mention Microsoft Office. Keynote goes for a reasonable 16 Euro in the App Store, and I happen to have enough in iTunes credit that I cannot spend on iOS apps anyway until I replace my lost iPod, or apparently on music.