You've added the caveat (and it's appreciated) but saying someone/something is the best at anything is a tall, tall order. Never align yourself to a tech, service or company so much that you miss anything else on the horizon.
Stripe rocks.
Documentation, interface, team, vision, customer service etc, it's all a notch above the expected. If there ever was a company that I wished that I could have invested in early stage this was it. Dropbox, Airbnb & Heroku are all great companies, Stripe has the potential to be an awesome company (no offence to Dropbox, Airbnb & Heroku intended).
That I like the founders on top of all that makes it an even better story, what's not to like about Patrick & John?
Stripe is a story worth knowing about, even if you're not in the payment industry, this is how you do a start-up tackling a tough problem.
Recognizing one's merits while disregarding another's merit (whether by malice or ignorance) has similar effects to just undeservingly trashing a company.
However, there are others doing similar work that deserve similar accolades. Balanced is one example. I think the work that Square and now Shopify are doing in the POS space is laudable.
It's just a matter of seeing the forest through the trees. Stripe is a big tree, obscuring a lot at the moment (with good reason) but it behooves us to continually look around and find new opportunities lest the entrenchment of companies like Paypal take root again.