Looks like a great talent acquisition. PhoneGap is a temporary (albeit, dragging on for years) solution. How long before the browsers adopt a common interface for mobile capabilities that will render phonegap obsolete...
well I'd look at the community building around PhoneGap Plugins for your answer there. I do agree that many of the standard APIs (which we lead/follow W3C on) will be in most mobile browsers in the coming years.