When talking startups, especially with non-entrepreneurs, the perception of what the challenges are is often very black and white: markets with no competition - easy, markets with competition - impossible.
I guess this is why so many people hunt the "perfect idea", which means something that noone has ever done before.
Personally I have experienced if you have no competition, very likely you will need to make people aware of the fact that they need your product, which is great if you are well capitalized with millions of dollars of VC money.
Conversely, markets with competition means that there are customers and you just have to make your product different by improving on a certain subset of features or making your product easier to use to gain a foothold in the marketplace since already a great number of people will be searching for your type of product anyway.
And then there's the third type, markets with so much competition that there's really no way to distinguish yourself on features, because people think of the product as a commodity, even if it isn't (e.g. Pizza.) that's when you have to start selling on brand and "experience" alone, which is what, I think, a lot of the technical people here are really afraid of: solving a purely social problem with no technological innovation involved.
I guess this is why so many people hunt the "perfect idea", which means something that noone has ever done before.