is this so bad? I see at a competitive advantage to use their platform.
I'd rather ship 1.0 and 2.0 quickly to learn from customers than focus on the one true way to build mobile applications.
Does not seem very niche to me.
Nobody's going to pick up Xamarin for fun, for experimentation, for learning, for scratching a creative itch. You can't download it for your kids or recommend it to your students. They have no product for use outside of companies and that guarantees it will be and die a niche riding on companies not wanting to retrain their .NET developers for iOS and Android.
Earlier this month I got to choose between Xamarin and everything else, I have years of C# experience and I like their IDE for general c#-on-mac stuff.
I chose Haxe instead.
However, their license makes their technology a niche product, when it could have been the main way mobile applications are developed.