It's possible to imagine a world where few ever thought to push HTML/CSS/JS to their breaking point to get desktop-like functionality from a website, because developing for the Windows desktop was free and a nice experience.
IMO (based on my limited view; I haven't studied the history) it happened because the market for smart mobile devices enlarged (one could argue Apple basically created the future & the market with iPhones, which Blackberry didn't manage to), Firebug and then Chrome made it easier to develop for the web, and developers found that these tools let them make cross-platform apps from a single codebase, with a much larger audience to go with it too.
Which is why I didn't see it as being an issue of price-point: I don't recall any better alternatives to it, whatever the price. Even if you were willing to shell out $1000+ for software tools, what alternative tools could you have bought to make it nearly as easy to make apps that ran on practically every major platform out there? Your only practical option for language was JavaScript (or if you were really desperate, Java, or I guess Flash), and Firebug and Chrome had (and many say Chrome still has) the best dev tools for JS. I don't see how being more willing to spend money on dev tools would've changed this on the client side.
On the server side, Windows had more to offer (and perhaps ASP.NET was a decent alternative), and prices probably mattered a ton there. But that's not primarily about dev tools, that's about the Linux being free and Windows Server very much not.
Note that Android chose Java, not for its performance on constrained devices, but for... developers.
I really can't see how to tell how plausible this is, that MS Phone could have won, through better long-term strategy, of free dev tools.
They didn't have any market share though, so there wasn't much money to be made making apps for them. I suspect they failed because they launched 2-3 years after Android and iPhone, so the other platforms had accumulated the network effects of an existing user base and app ecosystem that they couldn't catch up to. And they tried hard, IIRC, Microsoft offered to build a Snapchat client for Snap Inc, and to pay them to be allowed to do so, but were denied.
Apple managed to claw its position out of pure first-mover-advantage, and it's choice to build on top of a proprietary API. Had they gone with some HTML/js morass, it would have been easily dogged down and ground to dust on the interoperability battlefield.
Microsoft could wrestle Android out of Google's hands though... I mean, why not spinning their own Microsoft-oriented build around AOSP?
Actually, initially Apple expected people to deploy apps as webapps and provide links on the homescreen. There was no ios SDK. Only after a lot of loud complaining by devs did Apple release any tools or an SDK for ios native apps.