Admittedly, I was more excited about seeing Menace than the other two, but it was the first Star Wars movie in 16 years, and the hype it generated was something that the sequels would have been hard pressed to match. In the end, I think TPM was fun but much too childish for a Star Wars film, not to mention poorly acted. It was also, quite simply, unnecessary in terms of exposition; character introductions and the establishment of setting and conflict could have been set up within 30 minutes. A feature length film was not necessary to accomplish this, and in fact I felt that the story was stretched too thin as a result.
While the other two prequels definitely have their flaws, at least there was some meat to the story. AOTC offers up an assassination plot, a mystery, an (attempted) love story, and the outbreak of war. Then, with ROTS (in my opinion the best of the PT), you have a story that truly adheres to the classic definition of a tragedy: our protagonist (Anakin) undergoes a change from happiness to suffering (Anakin to Vader; married to isolated), often involving the death of others (Padme) as well as the main characters (the Jedi; Anakin himself in an Obi-Wan Kenobi-ish kinda way), resulting from both the protagonist's actions (Anakin deciding to save Padme at all costs; killing the Jedi) and the inescapable limits of the human condition (Anakin's fear of isolation; greed; his need for control).
Like I said, it's hard to defend any of the PT, as it just didn't have the same magic of the OT (or at least ANH and ESB), but to say that TPM was good or better than the other two is a bit hard to swallow.