Whoa, slow down there cowboy. I don't know if you're a troll or not, but since you managed to pick up an Informative mod I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Shirow is simply a giant in the 'cyperpunk' genre, and greatly influenced many who would come after. Yes, his stuff isn't as ground breaking as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov, I would challenge that it's still quality stuff.
First, to be fair, I will fully admit that GitS is overly flashy and stylized. Shirow has his faults, and if you're not into the fanboi service he caters to I won't fault you for it.
And if you want to just challenge the movies... okay. The first one is good, but does tend to be overhyped. And the second one is just bad. I am actually surprised at how much I disliked Innocence.
That said, I would challenge that the level of depth and detail across the Ghost in the Shell series rivals pretty much all the heavy hitters in that genre. Yes, both movies tend to give you watered down schlock, especially Innocence. But the detail in the manga is, at times, simply phenomenal. The geopolitical history, uses of both covert and extreme violence between super powers, the man/machine dilemma, the quest for consciousness and identity... and even just the raw covert bad-ass espionage is not just window dressing. And I think the Stand Alone Complex series captures a lot of those ideals. Yes, the story arcs in both are a little long and complicated, so if you're not into that I can mostly forgive you. But the individual story episodes mostly stand for themselves and aren't hard to follow at all.
I would also hold up his earlier works as shining examples of real sci-fi. The plot in Black Magic M-66 is nothing special nor is the art very impressive. But I they completely blew me away with how they presented the androids. Rather than the overly anthropomorphized machine used by too many others, here he have raw robotic killing machines without any human mannerisms, traits, or emotions. Watching them move in completely inhuman ways to be more effective combat machines gave me chills back in the day.
Dominion: Tank Police... okay, not so much. But it's suppose to be silly.
And while I don't know that Appleseed covers a lot of ground that isn't also covered in GitS, to be far, it was created back in the 80s. And it also has a lot of detail and depth in how it details the rise of civilization from chaos, and what it means to be human.