You make it sound so big-brother-esque, but users are the ones who chose native apps over the browser. iOS has had excellent HTML/Javascript support since the first iPhone - vastly, vastly better than any of its contemporary competitors. In addition, web developers had a full year after it's release to create compelling web apps, but instead they clamoured for native 3rd-party apps.
What's held back web apps is not Steve Jobs, but the fact that creating them is incredibly painful and produces results that are barely acceptable except in a very small number of cases where the application is effectively a web page to begin with. The standards and libraries have evolved extremely slowly due to the difficulty of pushing out browser support across such a wide range of slowly-updating platforms. What counts as amazing in the average web app today wouldn't have been an impressive native client application in 1992.