The Core

I've said it before : Drupal commerce is very good.

As a e-commerce platform it is up there and you don't need to worry about the Drupal side of things. However, if you want to get your hands dirty then the fact that it is entity aware makes for some incredible opportunities.  I'm pitching an idea at the moment for a blended community + store that I just don't see as being feasible on any other platform.  Still simple out of the box: Use kickstart and you can be running in a couple of hours. 

Drupal IS scary! Learning curve on it is horrible.  Damn powerful though. 

Drupal commerce kickstart though is a product built with Drupal.  If you don't want to learn any Drupal you don't need to.  I think that the structure of it is genius.  Where are Magento just piles on every feature, hacking and sticking on everything that is asked for, Drupal commerce has very few features: but those that it does have can be used in powerful ways. 

For instance there is a "rules" system that replaces pretty much every discounting, shipping, points, rewards module and a stack of other stuff.    Likewise concepts like entities replace all the mess of features and media and spec and structure it in a way that actually makes sense.  Simple, powerful and flexible systems. 

Drupal's big weakness (IMHO) is in deployment.  If you use modern deployment methods like GIT or even SVN it is a raging pain in the c##k. The data structure merges content with structure too much and makes a mess of version control. I have nearly killed people because of it.  That said, magento and wordpress both do that too (and it looks like this is well addressed in drupal .   If you hack live then this ins't an issue anyway.

If you are going to take a look don't get confused by the terminology: Drupal Commerce is the lego set to build custom e-commerce sites using drupal.  Drupal Commerce kickstart is the prebuilt off the shelf version made with that lego.