I think I found the concept/world particularly compelling because the bulk of the story ends up being about where and how that tech breaks: for instance, you've got an underground economy where the primary currency is essentially zero-days and plot points that (implicitly) center on concepts like cache coherency and eventually-consistent distributed systems.
Most of the other examples of sci-fi futures I wouldn't hate living in are far-future, the Culture being the obvious one. The grandparent seems to be on to something: there aren't a lot of hopeful (or at least ambivalently complex) recent works that focus on near futures instead of post-scarcity spacemen.
It's also seen entirely from the perspective of children, none of whom fully understand what's going on. There's an acceptable backstory to everything -- yes, even the ending -- but the show itself doesn't explain anything. That's all in secondary materials, little of which was translated.
(Well, it's based on a novel series. Does that count as 'secondary'?)
If you assume a rational universe, you can probably figure out most of it. Or if you're interested, poke me sometime and we can chat about it. It is, admittedly, one of my very favorite stories.
I still find GITS to be one of the more slightly pessimistic but overall realistic predictions of the future. A lot better technology but same problems as we have now.