I used to dislike iTunes. It's bloated with too many features, attempting to enrich too wide an audience. It's like an attempt to indoctrinate a new culture which turns people off. But in it lies the legendary link to the infamous ipod and iphone which is the new culture of many society today.
So when Apple decide to do the same with iphone by throwing the ipod into it, we began to accept iTunes as the next common day tool we fire up from our desktop. I use it to do primarily one thing - backup my data on the iPhone. But wait, if you are like me, a huge fan of audio books from Bill Clinton and such, you will kinda give yourself another good reason to put a higher value point on iTunes.
And of course, the iTune store empower my iphone with free apps but I would say the number of them does not exceed fifteen. The majority of them on the store are crapware. So stay clear of them until the QC team of Apple applications begin to sit up and work. Apple has her reason for the compromise and will do otherwise when the apps base hit a critical mass.