Blizzards new desktop application - useless or useless?

I remember the first day. Well, not the first first day, but those days you'd toss a floppy in and run the game. Simple as that. Of course, as the industry (read: underground communities) grew, so did their needs. Next step was to install games. Now, back then, many people thought "What the hell, it's 2 extra clicks, might as well do it". But this step enabled game publishers to push any type of terribleware they wanted on your PC. 

From useless stuff, like changing your homepage or adding a "Try X 30 days for free" to your desktop, to GameSpy Arcade which was required for online play. Back then, online play was Holy Grail, not many people had internet and not many people would pay for bandwidth to game online, we had LAN for that. 

After installations came launchers. Now, we're still in the clear here, it's just 1 extra step on top of other 20 you have to do, in order to install the game, and well it checks for updates and all the good stuff. Useless, sure, many people liked simply clicking the exe and running the game, but what the hell, it's a new trend. And then they killed it.

Enter platforms. Steam, Origin, Raptr, NCSoft Launcher.. You name it, they made it. These types of software introduced a whole new level of uselessness, especially Steam. It wasn't working quite right for a long period of time, it wasn't optimized, it wasn't stable, but you had no choice. Wanna play Counter Strike? You have to run Steam. Not sure at which point all ...