I have been looking to go minimal on my phone life to curb the smartphone addiction. I got a watch with cellular and it can last me all day on cellular only in places with great signal and I love it. The issue is is that the phone is always there. I would love to be able to cut it out and just have a “computer” and a “watch.” Am I alone in this? If Apple brought the watch maintenance apps to other platforms would you consider ditching the iPhone?
I’m sympathetic to your/our plight, but no. There are too many situations when talking into my watch would not work well or not be appropriate.
Interesting thought experiment, but I’m a hard no on that one. I just don’t find the watch to be that useful beyond very simple tasks. As an example, the other day I received a text which I tried to answer on my watch. I managed to write something non-sensical and had to go track down my phone to follow up and clarify.
Maybe if my eyes were 30 years younger I’d be better at navigating that tiny text, though. 
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Surely there is a lot you can do to your phone to ‘minimise’ it?
Parental controls (Screen Time etc), focus modes, delete (or at least hide) apps, remove all widgets, all social media, etc etc.
As far as I can tell, the Watch was built as an extension to the phone. Yes it can have cellular, but if all you want is basic messaging and calls… then strip down your phone to just those.
Personally, no, I think the phone would be the last Apple device I would ditch. I’d give up the watch before the phone purely on utility grounds. I don’t want to look up directions on a tiny screen, for one!
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+1 for all the answers so far.
Another + 1 for the previous reasons.
I would not. I’m sure there are other reasons I could list, but the first two that come to mind are taking pictures and reading. I can’t imagine a version of the Apple Watch that would fill those gaps, and an iPad wouldn’t be a practical alternative for me.
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My Apple Watch is a peripheral device to my iPhone. So my answer would be “No.”
+1 for deleting the additive apps.
I like that having a cellular watch makes it much easier to leave my iPhone behind or at least out of reach, though I don’t want to give up having a smartphone because there are too many times it’s useful to me.
But I think the option to tie an AW to a Mac or iPad would be a godsend for people who want to minimize phone addiction by carrying a flip phone or a cheap Android device that’s so low-end it’s unpleasant to use for time wasting activities.