Good luck looking at tiny progress bars when upgrading your ABC app, I'll just press refresh.
Oh, and how do you intend to share the ABC news stories with your friends? abc://article ?
Call me old fashioned, but when I want to share something with a friend, I either tell them about it myself when I see them, or worst case scenario I shoot a quick email that says "Check out the new episode of Castle on abc.com!" The only people I know who wouldn't be able to parse that simple message and then go to the website and watch the show also don't check their email or even have an active account. Not everything has to be an automatic, shareable mini-link that can be pasted into a twitter stream.
I guess hyperlinks aren't required for sharing, but they are so cool. The fact that on the web you can try a service just by following a link that a friend mails you makes things so incredibly frictionless. I supect that conversion for "just go look on abc.com" is a lot worse than "click this link".
Same thing for advertising. If there were no hyperlinks, you wouldn't be able to track conversion on your ads. That seems important.
Not to mention the fact that URLs are unique identifiers. So you can do analytics and find all the referers to your app/movie/article/whatever.
Web apps aren't going anywhere any time soon. Do you really want to install a Ticketmaster app and wait while it downloads just to buy tickets for one show?