As someone who has only dabbled with Obj. C but has 10+ years of traditional web dev experience this looks v. attractive. What am I losing by not learning Obj.C/xcode to build native iOS apps?
What you are missing out by not building native apps is an environment that is designed to really help you create great apps for users. Even with the crazy rate web technologies have been developing, a lot of it still feels like a bunch of hacks compared to native app development, which feels much more natural to me.
Andrew Cross did a write-up about it (http://www.andrewcross.ca/2012/03/16/quick-tips-from-sxsw-fo...) the gist being that many companies started out using something like trigger.io/phonegap/others so that they could benefit from the quick iteration cycles and other benefits of web. Once the things settle down a bit, they built native apps.
Phonegap/Titanium are great, but they're hacks. Phonegap is just running your app in an uiWebView, then exposing some of the camera/etc. stuff via its own API, yeah?
That's great, but IMHO, it shouldn't have to be like that.
How is that any different then what Apple originally intended, and still makes available for web apps? PhoneGap is just exposing more native features than Apple does?
The Phonegap project (now called Apache Cordova) is maybe a bit better because it supports more platforms:
And they much prefer our simple dev process, fast builds, and native UI components.
</plug>