Seems like there's a reasonably good chance that we'll see a tool to automate this process—an "installer for apps".
I guess Apple would likely respond by one or both of (a) putting up more roadblocks to getting developer accounts or (b) further restricting what apps can do at a technical level through more sophisticated sandboxes, making the delta in allowed functionality between an app in the App Store and a sideloaded app smaller and smaller.
They must have expected this when they changed the latest xcode to allow free personal provisioning.
There's already some significant annoying limitations, in particular short provisioning expiration limits (must reinstall the app every 90 days), and no access to services like push notifications.
Yes, once a provisioning profile expires, apps built against it fail to launch.
You have to rebuild and reinstall the app (with an updated provisioning profile, but Xcode takes care of all that behind the scenes now) to get an expired app working again.
In addition, people underestimate what you can do from the sandbox (and will be able to do for a long time, unless Apple speeds up its development cycle): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10415288
I guess Apple would likely respond by one or both of (a) putting up more roadblocks to getting developer accounts or (b) further restricting what apps can do at a technical level through more sophisticated sandboxes, making the delta in allowed functionality between an app in the App Store and a sideloaded app smaller and smaller.