When Valve created Steam, they did it because there was no system for distributing games over internet and everyone said that the technology is 5-10 years in the future, not now. So we have had Steam now for several years and it's the most used games distribution system over internet.
What comes to the game updating, internet connection speeds get faster. PC's get faster. Systems are online more and more daily so if everything is automatic and game gets a patch, it's not a very long waiting period when you have that downloaded. Of course it depends from your own internet connection.
Some of these digital distributing services will either go down or will be bought by another but the faster these things start working together and putting up more games into the catalogs, the less issues there will be in the future.