How about Cydia, which predated AppStore by 2 years?
if Apple had launched the app store with the iPhone, it would have had no where near as big of an impact as it did by waiting just a year. they created the demand first.
and no, Cydia was launched 5 months before the app store.
My only point is that the AppStore is not the Second Coming. It is and it only is a package manager. Just like all the others that came before it. And nothing more. It is not some searing example of genius. It is one package manager among countless. That it includes a payment system is an irrelevant detail.
What Apple did that is amazing is creating a community of developers out of nothing and gave them excellent tools to create software for their platform. It seemed overnight that the ocean of Windows applications, mostly due to obsession with backward compatibility, was no longer all that special.