There's definitely a bit hand holding with Parse that makes it attractive to a inexperienced developer. If opening a socket and sending and receiving binary data makes you nervous, then Parse is going to make you feel a whole lot more comfortable.

But the real win with Parse is that for small to medium sized apps, you don't need to manage your own servers. Apple takes care of delivery, Parse takes care of the backend. You don't need to worry about uptime or maintaince or 2 am notifications that your server is down.