Eh, I just got an iPad for my mom, after owning several Android phones and tablets, and my sister used to use an iPod touch as well. We both agreed that the App Store is a piece of trash. It's slow, confusing to navigate around, and doesn't auto update your apps (I think I heard that's coming in iOS7?). It looks the same as it did on my sister's old 2G iPod touch.
Meanwhile, the Play Store search and navigation used to suck, but they've both improved a lot, and they keep the highlighted content fresh and relevant, which surprises me coming from Google (though not having used an iOS device extensively I don't know how often they update their featured content, but from this post it sounds like not often enough). They've fixed most of the stupid issues they had before and I actually like using it now.
I've found pretty much the opposite for the Play Store. I like that it's relatively fast and much more responsive than the App Store (which is quite frankly terrible), but finding anything I actually want is a pretty dismal experience as well (this is unrelated to the quality of the actual apps themselves).
All the navigation is counter-intuitive (What do you mean swiping to the left doesn't go back and instead takes me to categories or who knows where? Why doesn't the back button take me back to my search results? etc). The curated front screen rarely seems to have anything new and interesting on it (for apps anyway, I never look at the media part of it), whereas the App Store constantly has new featured apps which are actually good. The first six months I had my Nexus 7 the "here's stuff you might like for your tablet" section didn't change.
I quite like my Nexus 7 and am considering switching to Android for my next phone now that I've found a few apps that I can bear using (and some of them are actually well designed to boot), but apart from automatic updating, the Play Store is not one of the attractions.
Err, why would swiping to the left go back? This isn't a standard UI pattern in Android at all, and honestly I don't think it even makes any sense. The back button always takes you back to your search results in my experience, I don't know what else it would take you to.
Hrm, apologies. I was at work and didn't have my Nexus on me. With the back button description I was mixing up its behaviour with the other back button (the one at the top left with the 'back' arrow). That's the one that dumps you out of your search results and back to the main category. I'm not sure if it's because I'm primarily an iOS user that I expect the '<' indicator next to it to mean "go back to the last thing you looked at".
The swiping thing was referring to the category pop-out in the main sections (Apps etc) which makes it feel like it should do something else. In retrospect I probably should have waited until I had gotten home and double checked whether what I remembered was correct before commenting. Having a flip through it, the store is less awful than it was last time I paid it any serious attention - having a decent stable of usable apps I haven't had much cause to go looking for new stuff lately.
Plus they've now got that single sign-in feature which does make the installing process better. And you can download apps from the browser, rather than iTunes, meaning you can use any computer.
Meanwhile, the Play Store search and navigation used to suck, but they've both improved a lot, and they keep the highlighted content fresh and relevant, which surprises me coming from Google (though not having used an iOS device extensively I don't know how often they update their featured content, but from this post it sounds like not often enough). They've fixed most of the stupid issues they had before and I actually like using it now.