It offers something different than Steemit.com in that it's a mobile app and mobile first. What we can't isolate is how eSteem leads users to powerup Steem, burn Steem, or bring new use cases to Steem.
For example, Steem can't be directly used for advertising on the site. So, we're placing this in the middle tier.

Surprised to see this, we have mentioned how powering up and usage of STEEM to be introduced in our plans. One of the examples, we already released in recent update of Surfer, people can use STEEM to purchase goods inside application and we are adding more features that will, not only encourage usage of ESTM but STEEM as well. And other steps that were mentioned was, improved gamification across our apps so that when users are powering up they are rewarded, when they burn they will be rewarded again. These changes are being worked on and released with steps. Also, eSteem is not just mobile application, we have desktop application Surfer and Web application which we recently launched. All products working together and with iterations we are moving towards having fully fledged products, no other frontend currently offer. Note, we do run our infrastructure (full node) as well to help our users stay connected always.

Hope this helps to clarify some points...

Thanks for good work!