Especially since the 1.3.1 WebOS release, you can easily see the lack of success of the official Palm App Catalog: Only about 60 Applications are available to me from there. Why is that? Because the default setting in the app catalog for any developer uploading the application is "US Only", i.e. people who bought their Pre in other countries like Germany will not see the majority of applications. That's really weird considering how much effort Palm is spending in trying to convince people to write applications for WebOS to increase the attractivity of their product. Now they artificially reduce that for everyone outside the US.
So that's even one more reason to use the alternative package installer called Preware which is available from webos-internals.org. This alternative installer supports any number of feeds. It removes the single-point of failure that an official Palm App catalog creates, and replaces it with a proper community-driven approach. Anyone can write and publish applications, anyone can distribute them to the users, just like anyone is able to distribute/install MacOS, Windows or Linux applications on the PC!