I just view it as a relative minor convenience, but it's not some game-changer IMO.
The tool use / function calling thing far predates Anthropic releasing the MCP specification and it really wasn't that onerous to do before either. You could provide a json schema spec and tell the model to generate compliant json to pass to the API in question. MCP doesn't inherently solve any of the problems that come up in that sort of workflow, but it does provide an idiomatic approach for it (so there's a non-zero value there, but not much).
Yea it certainly does benefit Claude Desktop to some degree, but most MCP servers are a few hundred SLOC and the protocol schema itself is only ~400 SLOC. If that was the only major obstacle standing in the way of adoption, I'd be very surprised.
Coupled with the fact that any LLM trained for tool use can utilize the protocol, it doesn't feel like much of a moat that uniquely positions Claude Desktop in a meaningful way.
MCP is useful because anthropic has a disproportionate share of API traffic relative to its valuation and a tiny share of first-party client traffic. The best way around this is to shift as much traffic to API as possible.
The tool use / function calling thing far predates Anthropic releasing the MCP specification and it really wasn't that onerous to do before either. You could provide a json schema spec and tell the model to generate compliant json to pass to the API in question. MCP doesn't inherently solve any of the problems that come up in that sort of workflow, but it does provide an idiomatic approach for it (so there's a non-zero value there, but not much).