A few issues with this article. First, if jQuery is censored in the app bundle, it could be 500k and it wouldn't matter. 500k isn't big for an app.

Second, ontouchstart is a tricky game. It's wonderfully fast, but breaks scrolling completely if you start scrolling from an ontouchstart-bound element.

Basically, it's a shortcut around learning Objective-C. You get a lot of quick wins, but the end product isn't quite as good - except if you're doing something unusual, like one-page apps with no scrolling. I find it's good for prototyping.