I think you may be right, but I have a couple misgivings. The year that iPhone existed without the App Store, no smartphone competitors came close to replicati

I think you may be right, but I have a couple misgivings. The year that iPhone existed without the App Store, no smartphone competitors came close to replicating it's core functionality and user experience. I don't think that's quite true anymore, and so I think that the App Store is one of the iPhone's key advantages. Specifically, the iPhone didn't need the App Store to differentiate itself from RIM and WinMo in 2007, but I think it absolutely needs the App Store to differentiate itself from the Pre and Android in 2009. I don't think there is one killer 3rd-party app on the phone that everyone needs to have, but there could very well be many third party apps that smaller niches need to have. For me personally, MLB At-Bat (live streaming of baseball games) and the Kindle reader are actually the two biggest factors keeping me from switching to Droid. Those applications could easily be ported to Android, but haven't been yet, and in both cases a third party holds the distribution rights for the content so it's not like me or another hacker could replicate those apps easily.