Just like other built-in things, the package.el is way too basic, both in terms of features and interface. It's also useless for packages you'd like to closely follow, as it cannot deal with git/bzr/hg/whathaveyou. Inability to pin some package to the given version is also a major pain.
It's kind-of OK for beginners, but for more advanced users it's disappointing. It's better, IMHO, to think about package.el as a low-level library implementing some functions useful for package management - but calling it a package manager, while technically correct, seems like a bit of a stretch.
There are other projects however, like el-get, which work. So it's not like Emacs has no package manager. It's just that the "real" package managers are far away from being built-in.
It's kind-of OK for beginners, but for more advanced users it's disappointing. It's better, IMHO, to think about package.el as a low-level library implementing some functions useful for package management - but calling it a package manager, while technically correct, seems like a bit of a stretch.
There are other projects however, like el-get, which work. So it's not like Emacs has no package manager. It's just that the "real" package managers are far away from being built-in.