You can distribute apps on your own; it's just that the process to do it is cumbersome. I can make excuses for why that's a reasonable restriction (Apple has some reasonable restrictions for iPhone apps that would be hard to enforce in the presence of popular ad hoc app distribution systems), but they won't be convincing to you.

Look, I probably agree that in a perfect world, stupid apps like this one would still be listed for download somewhere. So I'm not going to argue that the circumstances here are a win for the app store. I'm just trying to recognize that Apple has an extremely ambitious and interesting strategy for iPhone developers, which complicates things in weird ways. I'd rather have the Apple-controlled app store than what OS X has, and I'd 1000000% rather have it than what the RAZR has.