> I find the Steam client does it's job of launching games particularly well.
The client is really heavy, and if it's out of date, you're in for a long wait before being able to launch a game.
>It even makes it pretty straightforward to buy them,
Yeah, it opens the webpage inside the app. Any browser would do the same.
> and keeps them up to date in the background.
The steam client has no such feature: it only updates games IN THE FOREGROUND. There's no service or deamon that does anything in the background.
I have noticed that they don't screw with the UI every 2 months (Spotify et al.) and stick with what works. That seems to be a negative these days though.