I'm sorry but are you kidding here? You think a web developer who already has experience in all the tools used to create a web app is going to spend the equivalent amount of time learning a completely new languange, platform, developer tools et al AND THEN using them to program an app. I'm sorry but that's really a ridiculous thing to say.
(and I don't mean to be rude but really, who voted this comment up? If you don't know how software development works you shouldn't comment or vote on posts that involve it)
As for the rest of your argument,AT&T's Edge connection downloads at around 25KB. So a 1K page (which you claim causes an "unpleasant wait") would download in 1/25th of a second even on a slow connection.
As for the rest, my point still stands. Everything you spoke of requires a cracked iPhone which the great majority of people don't have anyway.
For the record, you're wrong below but I can't reply to you and I don't know why. But the short of it is anyone who is ACTUALLY a developer knows there's a lot more than picking up a language to development (though again there will be time to pick up the language and that will be time a web app developer wouldn't need to spend). You have all your tools including your editor, unit testing tool, etc... So again you're wrong. And yes there might be overhead to a web app but at 1k it's still going to come down in about a second or two. And Latency, this is the first link I found off google: http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/28/atandt-customers-seeing-s... I don't think .91 seconds is going to kill anyone