If you use search many times a day, like for work, then it's a much more pleasant and efficient experience. Search results are customizeable, you have a personal blocklist, AI slop farms filtered out, etc. But yeah it's a hard sell for the casual user.

Not for me. But I'm often just browsing on their website directly.

Winget is a step in the right direction... but man it is SO SLOW. If PowerBI Desktop has an update, it is actually taking me 20+ minutes to update a handful of apps.

Heads up that watchtower is no longer maintained. I haven't yet looked into forks or alternatives.