It doesn't have to be the worst possible implementation to be less desirable than the walled garden for me. I get so much spam in whatsapp, groupMe, telegram, and from sms. Some of it is even from legitimate contacts but then they signed up for something or did something and it sends one of those stupid "join me on {thing}" messages. The only place I don't get spam is imessage
I get spam on iMessage, and you can continue to live in the walled garden, nobody wants to force you to buy a third party watch, they just want third party devices to have the same API access as the first party device.