This makes me want to vomit. I can't wait until implementing flashy UI is so trivial and common that shallow things like this don't actually affect an application's perceived value. I don't remember the transition to GUI in the 80s as being as shallow as the mobile app market is.
Also, perception is reality.
Seriously though, you contest the idea that an interface with interactions which hide complexity and have been shown to be pretty intuitive could be decisive in how users value a product?
Don't bet on UX enhancements ever going away, by the way; people come up with new things all the time. Pull-to-refresh didn't come from any platform vendor; it came from a third party Twitter client.
Then you weren't there. I'm pretty sure the first caveman to use a different pigment in cave paintings got the same shallow reactions.
Pull to refresh isn't flashy, shallow or trivial, and it shouldn't bring on emesis: It is a simple, convenient user interaction that saves putting a big refresh button or the like.