And that's the problem.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather there was no filtering at all and there was instead a sort of "paid apps have the option of getting Apple Certification and being listed at the top of all lists" option instead, but I don't think the App Store problems outweigh the benefits for users.
It's way above 1%.
Neither you nor your parent have any statistical basis for your estimates. As of early this month [1], there are over 100,000 applications in the app store. If 1% were rejected, that means that 1,010 apps were rejected. Your two apps could easily fall into that category.
Basically, all we can know is that many apps get accepted, but not all of them do. Any more clarity than that requires Apple's intervention (which I don't expect to see any time soon).
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store#Number_of_launched_ap...
The iPhone has some nice apps, but runs nothing important to me in my professional life. And if the new tablet isn't going to be a useful work tool, why would I want it?
I'd love to replace my netbook with sleek little tablet, but the odds of Apple selling something that runs Java, Ruby, or emacs is slim-to-none.