While it's not the end of the world, it's just plain annoying having to remove such a common sense feature. The consequence of this means that if you were to distribute a web browser via the MAS, you will not be able to ask the user to set it as the default web browser. That's just a subpar experience.
My hypothesis for the added restriction is that it might be considered a security hole for an app to just set itself as a handler, for say, http links.
The correct way to have handled this particular situation was to introduce a new entitlement and define what content types an app might want to handle, which will get reviewed by the MAS review team. Unfortunately, the solution [2] is: "There is no solution; it can't be done anymore in the sandbox."
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26241689/lssetdefaultrole...
Berners-Lee's original web browser was developed on the NeXT (direct ancestor of OS X)... But if he wanted to take that 1991 browser and distribute it on the Mac App Store today, he would have to remove important functionality.
Which begs my original question: what good is a "Mac app store" that can't accommodate Mac apps?
Apple isn't alone in this, of course. The Windows 8 app store (Marketplace, or whatever it's called these days) is just as limited... But really, if the most apt comparison for the MAS is the Windows 8 store, that further illustrates just how badly Apple has blown it.
Target market? Well lets try the average user who is much better off with buying from Apple who already has their credit card than going through some little website and their pain in the ass credit card form, registration and what not.
That's not the greatest endorsement ever.
"Of course I do interesting stuff on my computer, but the average person doesn't. All they need is X."
Importantly, X is never defined by asking actual users, but is simply a distillation of prejudice about the needs of "the common people".
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
From Wikipedia: "A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure." I don't see how that applies to the app store.
Maybe you're trying to use the slang definition of ghetto, in which case you want an adjective and not a noun. Try "The Mac App Store is ghetto, yo." But "The Mac App Store is a ghetto." I don't know what you're trying to say with that phrase.
[0]:http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto
Important issues with sandboxing were never resolved. Meanwhile existing APIs keep being moved to the restricted list, so as a developer you can't even count on your product being able to stay on the Mac App Store.