The average user aspect is not a useful simplification. Here's a slightly more useful simplification - there are people who take snapshots just to document something (e.g., a birthday), and then there are people who really care about making great looking photographs, whether they are documentary or artistic or something else. If you're the latter kind of person, the FCamera apps and the FCam API just gave you a great new set of tools.

The new tools are much more powerful than what you get on phones. In some ways, they are even more powerful than what you get with high-end professional cameras, because the FCam API is available for anyone to program against (try programming the software in a top-of-the-line Nikon... you can't).

But it's even more than that, because the FCam API enables many new applications (or higher performance / better fidelity in existing applications) for the camera that don't produce "pictures" in the traditional sense. Think about all the various apps that use a camera - barcode scanners, document scanners, overlays on live video streams, etc.