You can’t set it up without an iPhone. But, once you set it up - especially the cellular one, you can leave your phone at home. You can do anything on your watch that you can on your phone that would make sense on a screen that small. You can make phone calls, text, receive notifications, get directions, stream music and podcasts, etc.

As of the latest OS you can download apps directly to it.

Right now it requires an iphone. They've been slowly reducing the need to have one until pretty soon, maybe v5, won't require one

It’s at S5 already, which is actually v6 since there’s an S0. So maybe v7.

Sorta, since the S1 released alongside the S2 as a revised low end model.

Versioning wise it feels more like following up the v1 with v2 and a 1.1 revision.

iPhones were originally an accessory to iTunes. What you complain about is all software. Software is changeable.

The iPad even required iTunes to set up for the first year and half.

Not on these devices, it isn’t. Without Apple’s signing keys, they run whatever Apple gives you, until they are EOL’d and then they run nothing else, ever.

Yes but that’s irrelevant to the point.

I thought the point was that “the issues you are complaining about are just software, and software can be changed/updated”.

If Apple doesn’t make sufficient changes and upgrades, nobody else can - and the device is back to being an appliance that has the functionality that it has right now and nothing further, and it’s not “just a software upgrade away”.

There’s still no way to get the time display off of the face of my Apple Watch. You can customize everything except turning off the clock.

This is a predictable response that is trivially wrong. Originally the iPhone required iTunes to set it up. Is it an “accessory”?

iTunes was released for Windows in 2003, so it was available for free on all major platforms. The iPhone was released in 2007. If iTunes had only been available on Macs, it would have been perfectly reasonable to consider the iPhone a "Mac accessory", but it wasn't, so it isn't.

Nah, that’s a different sense of the word “accessory”. Trapped in the ecosystem is one thing. But the question here is whether it’s a substantial, standalone product.