Most of my professional work over the last two years has been targeted at mobile webkit, usually Safari, and while I have frequently felt the urge to defenestrate an iPad due to some weird quirk, I never reached the conclusion that someone had consciously crippled them. Mobile Safari's DOM rendering is all sorts of wacky and requires a frustrating amount of non-intuitive workarounds, but with regards to the orientation issues you mention, browsers haven't really had to deal with rotating displays until fairly recently. So, I can understand not liking the implementation decisions someone made, but attributing it to malice seems a bit absurd.
.. and unless there are some undocumented tricks I haven't come across, I've found web development for Android devices to be a truly unholy mess, significantly worse than Safari.