Firstly let me say that the Saleae is great for a whole lot of basic logic analyzer applications. I use it all the time for basic stuff. A lot of time time it's all you really need to get something working or diagnose basic problems. If you beginners types are looking to start a basic embedded design lab(stuff with microcontrollers), you probably won't be wasting your money on one of these USB logic analyzers. Especially if you don't have a 4-channel scope. Even if you later run into it's limitations and need a more powerful piece of gear, the USB analyzers are so small and simple to setup and quickly capture some data, it might still be your goto gear for quick simple jobs. Use the right tool for the job at hand. You don't drive your (metaphorical?)Ferrari on the golf course even through it might get you to the next hole faster, you take the golf cart.
Would the software be better if it had the features Dave talked about that are missing. For sure. But does it really considerably reduce the value considering the types of jobs you would be using it for? I don't think so. If your projects are basically making chips talk to a microcontroller, which I think applies to a lot of people, it's still a really useful tool in it's current state. And they are, albeit slowing, updating things. I'm surprised they haven't chimed in here yet actually. For a little history, they did a complete rewrite of the software to make it multi-platform recently and expand the decoding plugins.
That said, the one big issue I have with the Saleae software is that you can't re-import data into the analyzer unless it's still in the whole saved session format. They do have a "Save Session" and "Open Session" options which saves and re-imports essentially exactly the state of some dump as can be seen on the screen, but the format for that saved session-data is not documented or optional. What I wanted to do was capture some data with the Saleae, dump it to a python script to do some outside analysis, merge it with another dump from another trace that also had some outside analysis done to it, and then re-import and display both at the same time in the Saleae software. No go. I guess they don't want imports from other analyzer hardware to use their software for decoding or something. The saved session data looks to be in ASCII and doesn't look obfuscated, so at one point I intended to reverse engineer the file format but I lost interest before I figured out how they did the data compression. I didn't put a lot of time into it though.