It is easy to be blown away at first impression, especially if one has not had anything that good with other carriers.

Is EK J very good? Yes, I would say so. However, as 4 flights (all on A380s) in the past fortnight showed, they are not amazing:

- Slow service for those down the back of the J cabin (why can't they divvy it up into halves and cater at the same pace?)
- Did not get chocolates towards the end of every flight
- Hot towel after the meal is a bit hit and miss, in that I did not always get one
- Told that I could not have my tablet on my lap during take-off
- Inconsistency of the hard product: sometimes the power plug is by your eyes and sometimes it's by your feet, sometimes there is a cubby hole under your feet and sometimes there isn't one
- Undercatered on the first choice main (it was obvious even to me that it was the most appealing dish of the 3), so had to get the fish
- Wine list is not always given. While they tried to describe the wines to me, I had to insist quite firmly on reading it myself
- Warm nuts sometimes given and sometimes not
- No proactive "let me take your jacket, sir"
- While the window seats have lots of storage space, one of the compartments simply would not open up and I was glad that I moved my stuff to the other one while I could
- When I ask for water, I was told to use the Voss bottle in my bar
- During one of the flights, one lavatory ran out of paper towels by the time I went in, so they do not seem to check it often enough
- Sometimes you can board from the EK's own lounge and sometimes you cannot
- The crew insists on collecting the blankets before landing even though I used it to keep my feet warm
- Touchscreen on ICE is sometimes mis-calibrated and I could not tap the button that would turn off the screen
- J pax should have 500MB of wifi data allowance
- Unless one sits upright, the slide-out table is often uncomfortably low to put a tablet on to watch things after a hefty meal

That's not to say that other carriers would never suffer the same issues, but I just wanted to highlight that EK is by no means immune despite being very good.