I'm all for browser-clients everywhere if they could keep up with native clients in terms responsiveness, and hardware-software integration.
This has never been the case, and I don't think it will for some time to come, if ever.
Innovation on the web moves at standards-speed (de facto and open). If 80% of your users are stuck on IE6 or lower (circa 2007), you will be hard pressed to make anything web-based as usable as the iPhone and it's native apps that showed up around that time.
Apple's cloud isn't for serving everyone; just users of their products. Consequently they can move faster than standards with their native binaries, and be out in front of web standards (with graceful degradation for non-Safari browsers) for web clients.
This has never been the case, and I don't think it will for some time to come, if ever.
Innovation on the web moves at standards-speed (de facto and open). If 80% of your users are stuck on IE6 or lower (circa 2007), you will be hard pressed to make anything web-based as usable as the iPhone and it's native apps that showed up around that time.
Apple's cloud isn't for serving everyone; just users of their products. Consequently they can move faster than standards with their native binaries, and be out in front of web standards (with graceful degradation for non-Safari browsers) for web clients.