[pohl]

It helps to not conflate iTunes (an application) with the iTunes Store (a service). The latter can be accessed either from the former or from a handful of roughly equivalent apps on the device itself (an App Store app, an iTunes Store app for media, a Podcasts app...) There are very few things one cannot do without the former — which is good, because odds are that, when someone is talking about how bad iTunes is, they're criticizing the desktop application specifically.