What "miserable slum", though? Honestly, I find Netflix's Android app an absolute delight to use. Even if I'm sitting on my couch with my laptop, I'll pick up my phone to cast something to the TV before I use my laptop for that purpose.
All in all, average customers (as in, not the majority of the HN crowd) seem perfectly happy with the current experience. Even if they had to install a native app to watch Netflix on their laptop, I doubt that would change their perception much.
That seems to be the false dichotomy. The claim is that EME is justified in order to get rid of the oh-so-evil Adobe Flash. But if using native apps is a satisfactory alternative that can also replace Flash then why do we need to corrupt the web?
Because "corrupting the web" is still going to be a better experience for consumers, and cheaper/easier to implement for producers. If EME didn't make it in, they'd build their own native apps, but they don't want to have to do that if they can help it.
All in all, average customers (as in, not the majority of the HN crowd) seem perfectly happy with the current experience. Even if they had to install a native app to watch Netflix on their laptop, I doubt that would change their perception much.