Why on earth would they go 144x80 pixels shy of 720p, 1280x720?
Hasn't the world suffered enough from transcoding? So the eye sees your perfect DPI, but the pixels are going to be imperfect because it's a random down-sample size that doesn't divide anything standard.
I don't get it.
44 is a magic number in iOS development. All navigation bars are 44px tall. All tap targets are recommended to be at least this size. It's very easy for developers to conceptualize 88 more vertical pixels and what to do with them; much easier to work with.
And let's face it, iOS is about the apps over watching videos. I'm sure 16:9 videos will look great.
Yes, I'm sure "blurry as fuck" is what people look for in a backward compatibility feature. With 2:1 already dodgy, 9:8 scaling would have flown really well
Edit to clarify: for video. Videos and photos scale oh-so-much-nicer than pages of static text.
For a lot of apps, it could mean doing nothing at all, since the typical app has a navigation bar at the top, which won't change, a list view which will just stretch longer and show more cells, and a tab navigation at the bottom, which won't change either.
Of course, this won't work for all apps, but at least it will work for many, whereas going for 720p, will make pretty much nothing work out of the box.