A lot of the software IS crappy and it is certainly Windows only.
Amen to that! One of the first things that got me interested in developing this software was how expensive decent electronic test tools with capable software really are. Unless you're willing to drop some serious cash, you get a device that contains no more than £15 of parts being sold for >£400, with VB6 software than is generally no more than barely usable with each manufacturer reinventing the wheel over and over.
sigrok is cool because we can use the same software to sample from any device, but they can all share the powerful decoding features of the software, no matter how expensive the logic analyser hardware. Then we can begin to do cool stuff by piping the collected data through any script or FOSS tool that we might care to try - even in continuous real time. For example recently I have been working on an IS decoder (digital sound) that can extract the digital data from an audio interconnect, then pipe it into a wav. I can now hear what my DSP chip is producing, and that with a device that costs less than £30.
Bert Vermeulen has been working on adding support for analog sampling for oscillascope devices. Maybe one day soon we will be able to leverage the power of GNU Radio, and have them work as a spectrum anaylser, a demodulator.
The possibilities are endless, and lightyears ahead of anything the proprietory world has to offer.