A bunch of people in my office are playing this game....enough so I had to set some rules on it. None of the people obsessed with PG that I know are "gamers" in the sense you and I are, and they find this game fascinating. My wife and son, both of whom are gamers of their own sort, love this game.

This is definitely a game....possibly a very good one, but not for the target demographic you and I occupy. I think that for this game to occupy a space where I'd find it enjoyable, it would have to move away from the vastly larger space of general interest it currently occupies. Right now, I have co-workers who find my obsession with FPs multiplayer and titles like Destiny or Elder Scolls Online to be mystifying, but they are playing PG like it's the be-all and end-all.
 

"as gameplay goes it isn't terribly interesting" - for you. As Nicholas comments above, however, different people have different criteria.

Gamers tend to have a tighter definition of what a "game" is than non-gamers. To regular folks a "game" can be just about anything you do for fun that has some element of structure to it. Flipping balls of waste paper into a bin is a game. Counting all the yellow cars you see on the way to your aunt's house is a game.

By the standards of non-gamers I'm certain Pokemon Go meets all the requirements of a game and the evidence so far would suggest its a game a lot of people are enjoying.
 

I played a lot of Ingress, the previous game that Niantic put out. I think a big part of the appeal of that game was that it was kind of a "sandbox" game. You could determine your own objectives to some extent, and most of the things you could do constructively would require you to go out into the world and visit a specific location. In Ingress, you got extra experience for linking two "portals" (located in the same world locations that the pokestops and gyms are now), and even more experience for closing the last leg of a triangle. Your ability to do this was affected by whether nearby portals were owned by your team or the enemy team. So there was some strategizing involved, since often you would want to visit a particular location in order to advance your goals.

The "goals" were largely self-defined, of course. The only real metric was leveling up, just like in Pokemon Go. One thing I don't like about PG is that the locations are all more or less interchangeable. There's no need to travel to a specific location, instead of just sitting around farming one stop or several. The territory battles for gyms are visible, but there's no major consequence for holding a gym or not holding it. The XP from fighting isn't even very good anyway.

I think, though, that the real appeal of this game isn't so much the rules, as the "Wow, that's cool" factor of playing a game with your physical body, interacting with real life locations. That's fun enough for me to keep playing for a while, even if it doesn't last forever.
 

I'm having a fair bit of fun with it. I would say that taking gyms is a lot easier than you'd think. Mainly because the attacker has so many advantages. Always having 6 pokemons versus the defender usually having two or three. Being able to pick your matchup favorably in Pokemons paper rock scissors style weaknesses. Not needing to defeat all the defenders to actually reduce the prestige. Being able to actively dodge attacks when attacking. Still not saying its a great system but the experienced player gap is fairly small beyond your first few levels.
 

Dude! If you're walking around looking for Pokemon, you're doing it wrong!

You need to drive around in your car. Now, NEW Pokemon won't spawn for you if you go more than 20 MPH, but existing stuff will show. So when you get to a Pokestop, you just slow down and drive on the lawn or whatever to get as close to it as possible.

Disclaimer: Do I play the game myself? Hell no! This is the stupidest, most unsafe thing I can imagine doing with a phone. I'm just glad there is no cell coverage on my property so I don't have idiots looking for virtual critters here.
 

Golf: no longer the gold standard for spoiling a good walk!
 

It is not a top quality game. It is Pavlovmon. You walk and your phone vibrates, giving you a reward so you walk some more.
In my opinion it fills the niche similar to Zombie Run only for walkers. The base game is walking. PokemonGo is just an expansion mode for people that find the vanilla product unmotivating, giving them a little extra something to do.