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Ed Kolis said: Oh yeah, and then there was the one (though I don't think this was Asimov) where a scouting party of some feline looking aliens invaded the earth, landing their starship... and out came a bunch of these aliens dressed in chainmail, wielding swords, and anxious more than anything to use an outhouse... when they were surrounded by humans with machine guns and grenades, they quickly surrendered, as no one but humans had thought to develop more than the most primitive of weapons, armor, or latrines! Everyone else had focused their research first into bare-bones life support technology and then into propulsion; the felines and the humans were apparently the only two aggressive races in the galaxy, and since the humans never happened upon spaceflight while the felines did ages ago, the felines had plenty of time to expand their empire without much difficulty, not needing more than primitive weapons or waste disposal (hey, space is a big trash can!), while the humans needed to fight each other for room on the earth!

I remember that story, definitely not Asimov, but my Google fu is failing me to come up with the correct author. The title was something like "The Road Less Travelled" (Frost's famous poem was quoted towards the end), the invading aliens were ursine, not feline, and used black powder muskets. The story was a sequel to another where humanity had used the captured FTL tech to dismantle the ursine empire; the first story was about our first encounter with another species that followed our tech path rather than the "normal" focus on the FTL drive, which most species discovered during their Iron Age. (There was mention of one species who found it during their Bronze Age.) Both stories were published in Analog.