It's all business, so I suppose all's fair, but it hardly paints Facebook as a hub of innovation.
From Facebook's point of view, why pay money for an app which can be developed 12 days? The only reasons they would acquire Snapchat are for the team and the users.
The users of Snapchat are likely to already have a facebook, so they likely don't care too much about the users. They will paint it as being more convenient for the users, which is true, but it's also true that the nature of capitalism is anticompetitive.
http://proletariat.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/the-myth-of-capi...
In the case of Instagram, Facebook had more reasons to acquire, but I still don't think that one was really worth 1.2 billion.
It sort of shows. I installed the app just to play around with the backend of it, and it's fairly easy to get stuck in a loop with no back buttons. There's also bits of the app that don't make sense, like the differentiation between the different types of received "pokes".
Sure, it's like SnapChat, but isn't that always the dynamic in this industry: the Feature Qua Product (simplicity, focus) vs. Feature Qua Feature (integration)? Some folks, like those who use Buffer, for example, simply prefer tightly-focused, standalone apps while others prefer ones that do more, that integrate many features into a (sometimes) cohesive product a la HootSuite. Personal note: while I'd have been tempted to compare them to Apple or Google in the past, Facebook's turning out to be a lot more like Microsoft for the web, appropriating features or buying companies to Do Everything, even if they're not the best in each vertical.