Wow, this thread is awesome... So here is my list of my personal 'essential' apps ...
Browsers: Dolphin HD (but its been crashing on me lately), Boat browser, Firefox
Social/Messaging : Google+, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Plume, Foursquare, Google Talk, TextPlus (as I didn't include text messaging in my plan)
Keyboard: AnySoft Keyboard (solely because of its Davanagari language pack that lets me type in my native language script)
News: Pure News widget, News 360, ESPN Scorecenter, Currents (although it is not quite there yet, it is promising and I like it)
Documents To Go / Quick Office Pro HD, Evernote, Lastpass
Photo Editing / Management: Be Funky Pro, Photobucket, Photofunia, Picsay, Pixlr-o-matic, Quickpic, Speedy Uploader
Customization: Desktop Visualizer, Minimalistic Text Widget, Wallpaper Wizardii, Zedge
Music/ Video: Mobo Player, Pandora, Sound Hound Infinity, Spotify, Pandora (I also use Youtube a whole lot, and I watch Netflix almost exclusively on my Asus Transformer), TV Show Favs
Games: I am not much of a gamer... I only like to play more traditional games like Monopoly, Solitaire (Klondike), Wordsmith, UNO... I would have really liked Cricket T20 Fever if it worked as well as its iOS version
Wave Launcher, Wikidroid, Weather Bug Elite, Tapatalk
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk