what is the key difference, for you, between a repository accessible with a tool like aptitude, apt or yum, and the apple appstore? just commercial apps? Because there are other reasons why commercial apps on Linux is a fairly small market.
Mainly I was thinking commercial app support (ie payment API) and user reviews/ratings. It bothers me that, AFAIK, for the longest time no one had thought of including some sort of user feedback or ratings for software in an apt repository.
I mean of course there are difficulties with getting consistency when you have many distributed repositories, but I don't think it's an insurmountable goal.
I love the fact that I don't really need to hunt through shareware sites for downloading various apps on Linux. But I still find myself going back to Google every time I try to gauge the quality of the app I'm about to download.